T103.6c - Gmail Best Practices
Your inbox should be:
Your inbox should NOT be:
Archiving and Labeling
Don't over Label
Inbox Stress
- A place to hold new mail waiting to be read
- A place to hold read mail that needs a response that you are going to get to within 12 hours
- In some cases it should be a place to hold the last email which you replied to on a string, as a placeholder to remind you you are waiting on a response.
- A place to send notes to yourself to be filed or stored on todos when you are back at your computer
- The unread mail count in your computer should be much like your gas gauge,speedometer, odometer or RPM gauge. It is something you should be able to use throughout your day to gauge your work flow. If it isn't working for you that way, you need to change some things until it becomes useful.
- The unread mail count in your phone should be the same thing...
Your inbox should NOT be:
- A place to store anything long term
- A long term to-do list
Archiving and Labeling
- Anything and everything should be archived as appropriate as fast as possible
- Labeling should be kept to a minimum. Figure out ways you can put key words in the dialogue and use the senders email info to retrieve at all times prior to labeling.
- To-do's related to emails should be noted on an electronic to-do list and then the emails should be archived. They can be retrieved when needed.
Don't over Label
- Labels are Gmail's version of folders, but more flexible since more than one label can be applied to any single email. The only items you should have labels for are topics/conversations in which you may not know the names/email addresses of the people you are dialogue-ing with, and there is nothing else common to the subject or body which you can query for easy recall. A good example of something I label are emails related to upcoming travel plans (airfare, care rental, hotel rental, directions etc). I manage all my work with about 4 or 5 labels. I use to have 1000's of folders when I was on outlook.
Inbox Stress
- If you allow your inbox to run pages on end, and if the unread email count is not relevant, you will not have a good gauge to tell when things really are slipping out of your management capabilities. Unread items in your inbox show up on your phone as unread, and you want that number on your phone to accurately represent new messages at all times so you can sense what you have missed since last email.
- If you don't keep these items in check you will have no idea when it is time to Stress.