Filed Under (Productivity) by steve on 20-06-2009

Upon reading The Power of Less: The 6 Essential Productivity Principals That Will Change Your Life, I received some good ideas for slicing away a lot of excess in the BUSY work that I do, including dealing with tasks and information.

I came up with some additional ways of dealing with specifically, Email, on my own. I think this book impacted me more, for the “why’s” of streamlining your information management, than the How’s of what he teaches as techniques.

Many of us in this Info-Age (this phrase sounds overly corny and Editorial-ish, but I’ll leave it in) receive pretty long Emails - basically entire Newsletters - that you spend time opening more than one time.

This repeated “attempted processing” of a Single Large email is due to having that initial attempt at opening it, reading it, but then leaving it in your Inbox to switch to something else, because you just don’t want to finish it — and you don’t want to try to THINK too hard on what subfolder in Outlook you want to throw it into.

The bottomline: In Outlook, or whatever email program that you use, that “un-bolds” the subject line when you’ve opened it one time, you’re becoming more and more uneasy and uncomfortable due to not being able to really identify ones you’re finished with or still need.


Here’s how I handle long emails now. (The screenshot below is of an Email I opened up in Outlook, then selected FILE/SAVE AS)

The Outlook Save-As box


The Specific Steps

While You’re Processing Email

(The image above)

- Open the email
- Select “File/Save-As”
- In the Filename Box:
Put in an FTP address to an existing folder you have on your site

- DELETE that email - you can, because you have relocated it to a dedicated place, where you can get to it, at your leisure

When you’ve found some spare time, with your Internet-capable Laptop

- Just open up a browser, and navigate to your Site Address: www.yourdomain.com/email_to_read/

The image below assumes you don’t have index.html, index.php, etc.., so that your browser simply lists all of the files in the directory. This isn’t exactly how you secure a sensitive web site, so make sure you have use a hosted account where you don’t have critical info - or, just write a PHP script or similar, that reads the files, displays them, and makes them linkable.

Viewing the directory via browser

To Briefly Summarize the Purpose of this

  • As soon as possible after you receive Email, quickly decide if the Email is one that you will keep re-opening and it never leaves the Email Inbox.
  • Always have an organized way of reading these Emails (you have a specific URL to go to - very simple and quick to get to those lengthy emails), IN A MUCH MORE COMFORTABLE PLACE, SUCH AS READING ON YOUR MOBILE PHONE OR LAPTOP ON A PARK BENCH or something)

    Another Resource here: Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
    This book inspired me on creating “buckets” where Emails, (or anything else that has to be processed) can be collected for better quality attention and processing.



  • Comments:
    1 Comment posted on "Avoiding the Email Inbox Flood"
    faraz on July 7th, 2009 at 4:36 pm #

    nice ideas, thanks


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