Email Ninja Moves: Filters to the rescue!

  Splattering Bubbly Cauldron of Yummy 
  Originally uploaded by mrjoro.

This is Part 2 of the eSoup series about establishing healthy email habits and taming your rambunctious inbox. You can find Part 1, Zeroing Out Your Inbox here.

By this time, hopefully your inbox is either zeroed out or very close to zero, and you're no longer drowning in a sea of emails.

This the perfect opportunity for a fresh start and to put some systems in place to make it so that zeroing out your inbox on a daily basis is as easy as possible.

Filtering: Automatic Email Triage

Remember when we did the "triage" sorting when we were getting the inbox zeroed out?

We searched/sorted for spam and junk mail, for newsletters, blog comments, for emails from family and friends, and for each of these types of messages we put them in an appropriate folder or the trash.

One of the main time saving tricks for being able to zero out your email every day is to automate as much of this sorting process as you can so that you don't have to touch or look at the emails in order to get them in the appropriate folders.

We do this by taking a few minutes on the front end to set up message filters, which are a basic feature of most email clients. With filters you can have incoming mail automatically sorted into different folders, with certain messages labelled, marked as "Junk", or even deleted. This is a huge timesaver!

  Sabrina (Elizabethan) 
  Originally uploaded by laceygj.

Since it's likely that many of us use different email clients I'm not going to go into the technicalities of how to set up a filter, but will rather focus on what we're filtering. (FYI--here are the "Create a filter" tutorials for Thunderbird, Eudora, Outlook.)

Stuff to filter for

Blog comments--I tell mine to automatically go into a "Pending" folder; however, if you get tons and tons of comments like some people we know ;-), you might want to set up a folder that's just for blog comments.

Ezines--I personally don't subscribe to a lot of ezines, but one of my clients loves, loves, loves him some ezines and gets 15+ a day. I've set up his email so that his ezine emails go straight into a folder marked "Ezines".

Personal emails--If you get regular emails from certain folks in your personal life, you could filter for the names/email addresses of your friends/family and have their emails shoot straight into a "Friends/Family" folder. When I'm doing this for a client, I try to separate out the business-y stuff from the more personal items, but of course this is just a matter of personal choice, and you might want to have your personal emails go straight into "Pending" or "Archive".

Priority client emails--I have the emails from clients go directly into a special folder so that in the morning when I hit the "get mail" button and 200 emails come flooding in, I can immediately see if one of my clients has written me, so that I can read his email before tackling anything else.

  Coffee filter "rose". 
  Originally uploaded by Erin Or Die..

Task related emails--I get tons of email, but lots of it is predictable with the same action being done for certain types of messages. For example, one of my clients has an article submission site, and folks will write in wanting to know if their article would be appropriate for our service. The subject line of these emails is always "Is this article suitable?", so I filter for that subject line and have all those emails go into a folder called "Is this article suitable?" (how original, I know!). I do the same for other types of task related email so that I can tackle all of these tasks in a bunch, rather than always having to switch modes back and forth. I think if you are doing one action over and over, that if you can get your momentum going by tackling all those emails in a bunch, you work faster.

Spam/Junk--There are junk mail controls that you can use in most email clients. I use the one in Thunderbird, and basically you "train" the control to filter out certain types of email that you consider junk. Somehow spam still gets through though, so I do filter for certain recurring spam messages I get and have them sorted directly into the trash.

Stuff I don't need to see or save--I don't know if this is true of anyone else, but I get bunches of emails from sites that I don't need to actually read or save. These are auto-response emails, and I can't elect not to get them, but I don't need to read them, so I filter them to go directly into the trash.

For those of us who don't like to think first thing in the morning...

The huge trick with processing email is to be able to quickly determine:

• What the heck is this?
• Is it actionable (is there some sort of action I need to take in response to this email)?
• If it is NOT actionable, then does it go in the trash or in the archive folder?
• If it IS actionable, then what is the "next action" I need to take?

  Coffee Filter Dress. 
  Originally uploaded by sonyakarate.

For a big chunk of my daily email, these questions are automatically answered for me by the filters I've set up. I hit the "get mail" button, and the premilimary sorting begins automatically.

The junk items automatically go in the trash without me having to even look at them. The priority items are plainly visible to me in the folders I've set up. I can glance at my folders and immediately see I have 3 emails from a client, 5 articles that need to be reviewed, and 13 ezines that are neatly corralled in one area.

For the most part, I don't really have to think about what my "next action" is for the emails--the nature of the sorting/filtering has determined the action for me.

My exact filtering strategy may not work for you--you'll probably need to customize your filters to fit your own needs, since each of us gets different types of emails. The big thing to watch out for is the recurring emails and emails you can predict.

Truly, any amount of filtering that you can get going will decrease the time you're spending in your inbox. Plus, it helps with our morale to not be overwhelmed with an onslaught of 200+ random emails rushing into our inbox first thing in the morning! :)

Next week we're going to be talking about email exectations, aka the question for the ages: "How often should I check it?"

Other parts of this series:

Part 1: Email Ninja Moves: Zeroing Out Your Inbox

Comments

[Maryam in Marrakesh]

Hugely helpful. I definitely need filters!

[KG]

I never thought of this before, and this is just what I need at the moment. Excellent idea!

[Sharon Sarmiento]

Yeah, it's a really simple thing that I overlooked for years, until I started handling other folks' email and needed to figure out a way to process a gazillion emails in minimal time. I love any time you can make a tiny one-time time investment and then reap the rewards every single day. :)

[Maryam in Marrakesh]

I looked all over my two email accounts to try to figure out how to do this last night (Sharon, thinks I am joking when I tell her she's my guru.) but no luck. I am sending an email to our tech person.

[Sharon Sarmiento]

That's great Maryam-I'm not sure which email client you're using (Outlook? Lotus Notes?) but the way companies set up their email may be different. I would think they would definitely let you have filters. Especially with you and all the comments you have pouring in to your blog--just having a filter to direct the blog comments into a specific folder would be immensely helpful.

BTW--sometimes I look at your blog and start to leave a comment, but then I think, "I don't want to clog up her email!" so I refrain :-). If you tell me you've set up a filter to handle the comments, then I won't feel bad about leaving comments on your blog anymore! :-)

I think that companies should really invest some time in teaching their folks the time-saving tricks of email, seeing as though everyone spends soooo much time trying to manage it.

A reader emailed me last week regarding the post on "zeroing out your inbox" and he said that he discovered that his company email was set to auto-check every minute! This means that unless individuals at the company figure out how to change their auto-check that they will be pinged away from their work every minute! How's that for putting a spoke in employees productivity wheels?!!! Yikes!

[Ariel Glenn]

Hi! I just came across your site today and LOVE it! I just gave up TV and it has been rewarding but discomforting as I realize how much time I used to spend in front of THE BOX. I am using the list of ten things you posted about on 4/23/07 and that has helped as well.
Thanks!
AG

[Sharon Sarmiento]

Hi Ariel--thanks so much for chiming in and for your kind words. :-)

RE: giving up TV--yes, I know what you mean! I gave up TV starting on TV turnoff week, and was shocked to discover how much TV I had been watching when I thought I wasn't watching that much.

Over the past 2 weeks I've read 2 books, and I'm remembering how much pleasure I get out of reading. Makes me wonder how I ever got sucked back into watching TV! Now I'm reading instead of watching TV, which is refreshing.

Anyhoo--thanks for stopping by, and how to see you again! :)