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I wish people would treat including you on an email like @-mentioning them slack. It may be async, but it’s just as awful for signal to noise ratio. I’m just a

• jen729w 6y ago
  Yeah. Email makes me sad. I've brought a tiny bit of sanity to my Outlook inbox [0] by using many, many rules. The goal is to move an email out of my Inbox and to a folder of my choosing on receipt. I hit about 80%. (And every week or so I update the rules to try to capture more of the 20%. But the goalposts constantly move.) I then use a search folder to show "all unread messages", group the view by "in folder", and treat that as my inbox. (It still shows messages in the actual Inbox.) I find this very useful in removing some of the cognitive load of email. Before: - 10 emails arrive in Inbox. - Email 1 is about project x. You figure that out, switch mental context to project x, action it perhaps, move on. - Email 2 is about project y. You figure that out, switch mental context to project y, file it, move on. - etc. After: - All (most) of the email regarding project x is filtered to the project x folder. - When I choose to, I go there and do things. - I never have to cognitively switch out of 'project x mode' until I choose to. Setting up and maintaining the rules is a pain in the ass, and Outlook fights you at every turn. But for me it's 100% worth the effort. [0]: Corporate environment, so it's not like I can use any of these funky cloud services. It's what I got.
  • 6gvONxR4sf7o 6y ago
    This got me to download and try out outlook. Any tips for a noob trying to make my email more sane?
• awinter-py 6y ago
  yeah signal-to-noise is key with these tools