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Turn Your Inbox Into Hot Lava

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I hear people lamenting about their overflowing email in-boxes all the time. Even me own mother has trouble keeping the evil email demons away. Where does it all come from? What are you supposed to do with it? Will it ever end?

Well, this post should get you on the road to conquering your inbox and getting rid of that uneasy feeling that you may have missed, misplaced, or forgot something.

Unsubscribe From Everything

Why did you subscribe to all this crap, anyway? Your inbox is bulging at the seams because you have authorized all these different individuals, organizations, and companies to email you with updates that you never actually pay attention to. Even if you do enjoy these updates, they may get lost in the deluge.

The very first thing you need to do is go through your inbox and unsubscribe from every newsletter, mailing list, and auto-responder that is not of utmost importance. Do you really need an email every time someone pokes you on Facebook? Let’s be real, all the special  reports, groundbreaking videos, and  member’s only discounts are not doing you any good.

Filters Are Your Friend

If your email client of choice doesn’t have a method to filter a message on contact, I feel sorry for you. You need to set up your email like it’s hot lava. Nothing should touch it. Anything that does make it in should get burned up instantly. This is not as hard as it sounds. The key is in knowing beforehand what types of messages you receive and having your client handle them automatically.

Mailing Lists

Every newsletter and mailing list that you did not unsubscribe from needs to be automatically filtered out of your inbox and filed under a label.

Open up one of the messages that needs to be filtered:

  • The key feature that you’ll need for this step is “Filter messages like these…” in the “More Actions” menu.
  • You want to check “Skip Inbox”. This will Archive the message so that it doesn’t show up in your Inbox, but you can still find it by labeling, starring, or searching for it.
  • Choose a label that the message will be filed under, creating a new one if necessary.
  • Apply the filter to all matching messages

Important Emails

There are certain emails that I already know require me to do something. You should be able to easily identify these. Not just emails from your boss, but emails that definitely require immediate action. I automatically Star these types of emails and archive them so they aren’t sitting in my inbox.

Follower / Subscriber Notifications

If you’re like me, you have given up on keeping track of followers via email. If you do still have these activated, they should definitely be filtered out of your Inbox and labelled. There is no reason to have these sitting in your Inbox.

Use Your Imagination

Filters are very powerful and can also get pretty intricate. Email is pretty subjective. Given these two facts, you need to identify which emails in your inbox fit specific patterns and use the filtering feature to get them out of your inbox and either filed away and labelled for later, or starred/flagged so you can take action on it.

Maintenance

There is a more complicated version of this whole Inbox Zero thing, but this is the simplified version I use. When I go to check my mail, I check my Starred items first because those are priorities based on my filters. Once I’ve checked those, I hit the actual inbox:

  • Is this a task that I need to complete? An action item? Star It.
  • Read and archive everything else. Get it all out of your Inbox.
  • Go back to your Starred items and knock out your tasks / action items.
  • At your leisure, read your subscriptions and handle your email notifications

What Do You Think?

I’m just putting the basics out there to give you a starting point. This should work for most of us, but there are definitely specific situations that require special attention.

That said, I’m opening this up to questions, comments, and concerns that you may have with your email. I’m pretty good at this productivity stuff, so I look forward to helping you solve your issues.

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Ask Rahsheen: How Can I Recieve Texts Without Giving Up My Phone Number?

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Hello Rahsheen,

I just read your post on Twitter and it sparked an idea. I’m a dj and I often get requests for songs. I was wondering if there is a way to use Twitter so that people could text their request to me. 
The immediate questions that pop up:

Would the person texting have to have a Twitter account?
Is there a way to set up a private twitter so that these aren’t on the main timeline and I get notified when their directed to me?
Is twitter the right route? Is there something better?
Is this even possible? 

I own an iPhone if that helps. My main goal is to be able to communicate with people while I’m in the booth and make their listening experience better. A great by product of this would be collecting people’s information (cell or email) so that I can populate a list so that I can send dates and venues. Any ideas? All and any help is appreciated!

So, we have a few things here to consider:

  1. Anonymous: We want to recieve messages to our phone from members of our audience, without giving out our phone number
  2. List-building: We would like to capture contact info during this process so that we can keep our audience updated
  3. Simple Texting: Users should be able to text their requests and, this isn’t specified, but we want to make this process as simple as possible

I’ll lay out a few options I found and, if you were looking for a similar solution, you may find something that clicks.

Twitter

The most obvious solution is to use Twitter’s Direct Messaging feature. You would link your phone number to your Twitter account and set it up so that you at least receive DM’s via SMS. 

Process

  • User sends a text “follow + <your username>” to 40404 (which is the shortcode for the US, find the code for your country here). This should sign the user up to Twitter if they don’t have an account already and follow you in one go. They are now one of your Twitter contacts. 
  • Now the user texts there requests using the proper format: “d + <your username> + message“.

Notes

  • We’ve got (1) covered, as long as you don’t mind receiving DM’s on Twitter
  • In order to fulfill (2), we have to rely on the user to actually follow us 
  • The user will have to remember the proper syntax to text a Direct Message “d + user + message”. If they mess it up, you will never see the message. So, (3) is covered, but it’s not as simply as we’d like.

Email

April linked me to a Lifehacker article on recieving text messages without revealing your phone number. You simply create a Gmail account that forwards all mail to your cellphone’s email address. T-Mobile users would have an address like 4045551212@tmomail.net, for example. 

Notes

  • We’ve got (1) covered here, since the user won’t see your actual phone number
  • (2) should also be covered…kinda. We may be able to see the user’s phone number and cellular email address.
  • (3) is kinda tricky. This solution assumes your audience can send a text message to an email address. There are carriers and plans that do not support this. Even some phone models don’t allow it.

Drop.io

Chris and Ian both mentioned Drop.io as a solution. It’s probably one of the most awesome services I’ve come across. 

Process

  • Create a drop and distribute the email address for it. You may also choose to distribute the phone number for the drop so users can leave you a voicemail, or you can simply provide the URL for the drop.
  • You can choose to be alerted a few different ways when user’s add notes to the drop, including Twitter and SMS.

Notes

  • (1) is definitely covered here. We can actually choose to recieve updates via Twitter or Direct SMS.
  • (2) is problematic because I believe the drops are anonymous. I haven’t into the internals, but it doesn’t appear that Drop.io will tell you who sent what.
  • Drop.io doesn’t have a shortcode or phone number available to send SMS messages to, so you run into the same issues as with the Email solution above as it pertains to (3).
  • Even though you have to rely on the SMS gateway, there are features of Drop.io that are pretty amazing and it’s definitely worth a look.

Widget

We also have the option of having users send us a message via a widget on our website. Mona mentioned this one, to me and Google told me that txtDrop.com will help me set it up. You simply go there, create your widget, then stick it on your website.

Notes

  • (1) is definitely covered, the user will not be aware of your actual phone number
  • (2) and (3) are a wash with this solution. You won’t be able to capture contact info and users won’t be able to text directly from their phone or even send an email. 

The End

This is obviously not a comprehensive list. There are many services that can help with this problem as well as a million ways to mix and match the solutions provided. Tiffany mentioned that you can even buy your own shortcode from the Common Short Code Administration.

How would you set this up? Can you think of a better solution? Let me know in the comments.

 

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Remember The Milk: Adding Tags While Sending Tasks

In my post, Remember The Milk: Posting Directly from Your Desktop, we covered how to add items to Remember The Milk using the popular desktop launcher Launchy. This provides us with a lightning-quick way to capture tasks and ideas without interrupting whatever we may currently be working on.

With a simple tweak, we can actually make this setup just a little more useful by allowing us to add tags to the items we are sending to RTM.

Here is the command-line we are currently using for “blat” to email RTM:

– -body ” ” -subject “$$” -to <unique key>@rmilk.com -u <gmail username> -pw <gmail pass> -f <gmail username> -server 127.0.0.1:1099

We are using “$$” here to tell the Launchy Runner plugin to pass our first argument as the subject of the email. What we need to be able to do is to specify a second argument that can be passed as the body of the email:

– -subject “$$” -body “$$” -to <unique key>@rmilk.com -u <gmail username> -pw <gmail pass> -f <gmail username> -server 127.0.0.1:1099

Notice that we have:

  • Swapped the positions of the “subject” and “body” options
  • We are now passing another “$$” to the “body” option

This tells Launchy to use the first argument we send as the subject and the second argument as the body. Now, we can set tags for our tasks as we add them via Launchy:

Pressing the TAB key within Launchy separates the “rtm” command from it’s two arguments. The first argument is the name of the task, and the second are the additional options describing that task.

Keep in mind that we have the choice to set other options for the task besides the tags. You can view the details in the Remember The Milk FAQ on Sending Tasks via Email.

The one caveat here is that you may only specify one option as Launchy doesn’t allow us to enter a line-break.

Was this article helpful? Do you have a better way to do this? I would love to hear from you.