There are many articles being written about email overload these days, and as many articles on how to deal it. Most productivity experts generally agree there are two solutions: 1. Don’t get interrupted so often; deal with emails in scheduled time blocks. 2. Handle email in a systematic way, like using GTD. But they don’t talk much about what email clients can do to help. In fact, many recommend against using the automation features found in most email clients.
Why should we not use the computer in front of us to help? After all, computers are supposed to be productivity tools. I think the main reason is because email clients were designed long ago, in an era when people got far fewer emails in a day. Not much has changed in email client designs in decades and they simply lack the features. We need modern tools to deal with modern problems. Gmail’s conversation view is a great example of a modern addition to reduce the number of messages in our inbox. But unfortunately the only one in a long time. Today I will introduce you to the first set of tools we have in Zenbe to help with the battle against email overload.
Background
Before I get into any specific Zenbe features, I want to quickly examine why methodologies, like GTD, are so hard to stick with over time, and why automation features, like rules and filters as they stand today, are of little use in this fight. I’ve been using email for a long time and I’ve tried all the different ways, but none of them were very effective or satisfying for me. Even with my best effort, sooner or later my inbox gets overwhelmed, and I’m back to making another new year’s resolution to clean up my inbox. I’m not alone in my failure to tame my inbox because it is quite fashionable these days to declare email bankruptcy.
In methodologies like GTD, or its variants, the strategy is to use only a handful of folders or tags to organize messages by actions. All incoming emails in the inbox are sorted by hand into one of the few action buckets. I have to look at each piece of email and decide what to do with them. I have to sort through the family emails that are interleaved with important work emails. Once they are sorted and I’ve acted upon them, I have to file them away one more time. I believe their achillies’ heel is that they are extremely labor intensive. It is so exhausting to keep up, most of us fall off the wagon sooner or later. (Kudos to those with enough will power, and time, to stick with it for the long haul)
As for why auto-filing emails using rules is little better, once emails are filed into their various folders, it takes a long time to check all your folders to find new messages. The more folders one has, the bigger this problem becomes, which is why most methodologies say “don’t use more than a few folders”. The guilt inducing counter next to each folder is useless when it comes to notifying us of newly arrived emails because the counter going from 308 to 309 is meaningless to people without a photographic memory. Also because out of sight is out of mind. Emails auto filed in a folder are generally left forgotten.
So, while I agree the automation tools available up to now don’t help very much, I also believe there’s a hybrid solution that actually works. By taking the best ideas of the methodologies, mixing in a good dose of automation, enabling it all with a few simple client features, Zenbe has a practical and common sense way to help win the fight against bulging inboxes and forgotten emails.
Meet the New Sidebar
We introduced a new look to the mail sidebar today. It is cleaner and more functional than before. The two key features that are the enablers to the Zenbe way of managing the inbox are: The Unviewed Flag, and a Reorganizable Tags list. They are designed to address the specific short comings of auto-tagging using rules and make it easier to stick with a systematic program like GTD.
Let’s start with the unviewed flag, it is the little gray box behind the Inbox and Boss tag unread counter in the image to the left. That gray box appears when there is new email in that tag. In this case, there are new message from my Boss and in the Inbox. It is very easy to see at a glance which tag has new email. For users of many feed readers, the concept of unviewed should be familiar. We added this concept because it addresses one of the biggest complains about auto-tagging that I mentioned above. Without the unviewed flag, it is impossible to see at a glance which tag has new emails. With the unviewed flag, you can safely auto-tag emails and keep them out of your inbox without missing them. Some might say it is still inefficient, instead of checking the single inbox for all your new messages, now they’ve to check many tags to see all their new emails.
That is exactly the point. Remember one of the experts’ advice is to not check emails too often? The short coming of that advice has always been the possibility of missing the really important email between scheduled email time blocks. So I like to modify that advice to say, “Don’t check unimportant messages too often”. This will not reduce interruptions as much as strict adherence to a time schedule, but it is more practicable for someone living in the modern world. For example, if we can auto-tag emails from a hobby mailing list, family, and work, we can then decide I’ll only look at the mailing list after work, family mail during the time blocks, but check the work tags as frequently as possible. This gives users a finer grain choice, rather than an all or none choice. The best part is you can reverse that priority at night or during the weekend. In the normal GTD style workflow, you have to look at every message that hits your inbox. It just doesn’t make sense to spend even a few minutes of time during the day deferring messages from a hobby mailing list. This is where the second Zenbe feature steps in to help you. It is the reorganizable tags list side bar. The new tag list has two sections, the top section is what I call active tags. It used to be called favorite tags. And the bottom section is the rest of your tags. There is a super easy to use menu on each tag that allows you to pin a tag to the top section, or unpin it. See the drop down menu that appears when I clicked on the little triangle pull down button that appears when I hover over a tag.
I recommend pinning active tags at the top and changing which tag is pinned as often as needed. Having the active tags on top makes it easy for us to see any unviewed flag that pops up. For example, during work hours you might pin only work related tags and unpin your hobby tags. But on the weekend, you might change it around and put the hobby, family, and only the most important work tag on top, while putting the rest of the work tags below. I also pin seasonal tags to the top as needed. For example, during tax season I would put my accountant tag on top, but once my taxes are done, it would go below. Similarly if I’m planning a vacation, tags related to my travel will be pinned to the top until the trip is over. In other email clients, the folder or label sidebar is pretty static. It is almost impossible to arrange labels in gmail. A label called Tax will always be at the bottom below the fold, even if it is April 14 and it is the most important thing on your mind.
More to Come
I’ve been using this hybrid system for a while now and it works for me. To me it is a sensible balance of computer aid and human decision making. You can still follow the general spirit of GTD, but at a finer grain level. I hope you will give it a try. I can’t promise you’ll be able to empty your inbox everyday, but it will sure be a easier fight with the sorting capability of a computer on my side.
The core of the Zenbe “methodogy” is outlined here, and we have the new tags sidebar supporting it, we hope to add more features in the near future to make it even easier and better. I look forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback.
However, using a rule to look for a specific keyword that I have to include in my subject line seems like a round about way to mark an email as expecting a reply. What if I can’t work the word “Request” into the email subject? Or my subject contains the word Request, but I’m not waiting for anything back. In Zenbe we’ve an easier solution. You can simply tag any outgoing email before you send it. Zenbe provides a tagging mechanism in our compose window. That’s where can I add my “ExpectReply” tag to outgoing emails I need a response.
