Inbox Zero and the Desktop

Everyone uses email, and everyone faces the same problem: Email clutter. I’ve tried a variety of techniques to handle the constant stream of messages, some of which I need to keep handy, some of which I want to store somewhere, and some of which I’m not sure where to store. For a long time, I separated my email primarily by recipient or activity. Thus, I had an email folder for school administrative messages, another for class-related messages, one for personal messages from friends, and so on. After a while I developed so many of them that I no longer had room in the left pane of Mail.app. I had to scroll down just to see all the folders.

Thankfully, there are many people far more intelligent than I who have devoted themselves to coming up with solutions to problems like this. Merlin Mann has created an extremely helpful series of articles about Inbox Zero (the practice of managing your incoming email as efficiently as possible). Merlin’s primary point is that reducing your Inbox down to zero messages is the key to good email management. There are many ways to get there. The method that seems to work best for me is Gina Trapani’s Action-Archive-Hold system. It’s amazingly simple, and extremely effective.

Just use three folders in your inbox. In the Action folder, put all messages that you need to act on right away. The Archive folder stores messages you’ve already acted upon. I am currently using subfolders in the Archive folder, but my guess is in time I’ll move away from that. Spotlight’s search capabilities are pretty solid, and it may be just as easy to have all stored messages in the Archive folder without any subfolders. The Hold folder, as you might suspect, is where you place messages that are in limbo. Perhaps you’re waiting for a message from X before you can respond to Y. So you drop Y’s message into the Hold folder. When you’ve received X’s message and responded, you can either archive or keep the message from Y.

I’ve been using this three-folder technique for a while, and I find it makes me feel a bit less overhwelmed when I’m receiving many messages, all dealing with different projects. Instead of seeing everything I need to do now and in the future staring at me when I open Mail, I see only the newest messages in my Inbox. I sift through new messages and drop them into the appropriate folders, then get on with my life. When I have time between classes or at other times I’ve scheduled for work, I hack through the Action folder, taking care of the necessary actions until I can whittle all of the Action messages out completely. Periodically (usually once in the morning and once at night) I review the Hold folder to be sure I can’t archive or act on any of the messages in that folder.

The other day I realized that I could apply the same approach to my dekstop. I find myself gathering all kinds of files, many of which are temporary in nature, on my desktop. For example, right now I’m gathering information so i can figure out how to get the ffmpeg2theora transcoder to work for me, so I can convert MPEG files into Ogg Theora format (it’s for TLF, so it’s OK that I’m spending my time geeking out). I’m gathering little URL snippets, source files, and example files. So I’ve set up three folders on my dekstop: action, hold, and archive.

If you’ve read my review of Yojimbo, you’re probably thinking I ought to be using that fine product to do this. Yojimbo is an excellent tool for collecting and managing lots of little pieces of info in various format. However, the advantage of putting the action, hold, and archive folders right there on the dekstop is that it forces me, whenever something lands on my desktop, to drop the item into one of those three folders. Periodically, as with the Mail.app folders, I check the folders and move files as needed.

As for the folders themselves, I obtained them from Iconfactory, the source of all icon goodness. These particular icons were created by Corey Marion, who has made three sets of Battlestar Galactica icons available for free on Iconfactory. Hey, I never claimed I wasn’t a geek.