Laurie has added an interesting entry on his blog relating to his strategy for dealing with e-mails.
Whilst I have to say that it makes sense, I have to say that I deal with my mail a little differently. For starters I use MS Outlook and Exchange which makes life a little easier. I can use 'Rules' to filter my messages based upon a number of criteria into 7 main folders (some with many sub-folders). This makes it easy to identify what is important and what isn't. However it doesn't deal with the context switching issue, but that is more a discipline thing. I don't necessarily reply to messages as soon as I have read them, or read them as soon as they arrive, so I don't have the same problem Laurie has.
An ever so slight problem or rather inconvenience is that I have a number of e-mail accounts. This does make categorising my mail a little easier but it does mean that keeping track of messages is more difficult. My work mail goes through an MS Exchange server, I have a few POP accounts and then I also have Hotmail, Yahoo! and GMail accounts. Finding a nice way of aggregating the collection or at least viewing of all of these different accounts in one highly functional e-mail client has proved thus far to be impossible. I use Trillian for messaging and this does have to ability to notify me when there is mail in my Hotmail or Yahoo! Mail account which helps. I haven't been able to get the Jabber connection to work however so GMail notification is out of the question.
A problem I do have, or rather used to have is Spam. I get shed loads of the stuff, over 200 messages a day through work and the POP accounts, and about the same on the three web based mail services. The best solution I have found for this so far for mail collected by Outlook is SpamBayes a probability based mail filter which is surprisingly effective. My only issue with it is that I can only run it on the e-mail client which is a pain because I check my mail from a number of clients and occasionally use Outlooks web access facility. The three web based accounts all have their own filtering and are reasonable effective.
I guess in the end everyone finds a solution that works for them, unfortunately for some people this seems to be not using their e-mail.
Well after being away for a week it has occurred to me that my methodology only works if you keep on top of the messages arriving in your inbox!
ReplyDeleteI usually scan through my spam in case of a false positive or two, and returning to work to find several thousand messages in the spam folder wasn't fun!