I never read the GTD book. And I really don't care. The whole context/project/etc. stuff always seemed too complicated, and while I'm sure iGTD and Yojimbo do wonders for the disciples, I'm looking for simpler.
So I use Things. More on this later.
I have adopted some personal conventions around tagging and projects in MailTags, though: To-Do tags start with an @. @action, @hold, etc. As mentioned previously, there are five of these I commonly use: @action, @hold, @respond, @review and @waiting. I've also got @archive, but haven't used that in a while, and it'll get purged at some point. YMMV. Use the words you think in.
Then there are the location-based tags: these (following Twitter convention, unlike my @ tags, start with a #). #bay area, #dc, etc. Finally, I've got my project tags. In MailTags, these actually ARE projects, but they still all start with a ~. ~3303 water street sale. ~6036 contra costa rd move. etc. Projects can get colors, and I find that easy to sort them with, although all projects get a smart mailbox, as well as an address book group. Not a calendar yet, though, as iCal has no good ways to archive off old calendars.
Then there are the Mail Act-On rules. There are at least 6:
* a: Tag as @action
* h: Tag as @hold
* r: Tag as @respond
* v: Tag as @review
* w: Tag as @waiting
The sixth is because the latest betas of Act-On didn't differentiate between keystroke case, so I had to set up a c: Clear all tags. I believe this is rectified, so I'm going back to having 5 counterparts to the above rules:
* A: Untag as @action
* H: Untag as @hold
* R: Untag as @respond
* V: Untag as @review
* W: Untag as @waiting
Ok, before getting back to Mail rules, onto Address Book groups. As I said, each project gets a group, and therefore can have a rule with it. Each #location gets a group, and can therefore have a rule with it. And then there's groups for various Spam, Bacn and @tag addresses.
For instance, I get a lot of crapmail from HR. I don't usually care about it. Therefore, there's an HR address in my address book with all the useless aliases they send from, and that card gets added to my spam: blackboard group. Ditto automated nightly emails from the 10000 test servers we run.
The Bacn groups, like bacn: jira, or bacn: wine, or bacn: @review exist so that things that I care about, but not on a deeply personal, emotional level, can get tagged and moved out of the Inbox. Again, use your own labels. bacn: @waiting is a good one if you add the order-received@amazon.com and order-shipped@amazon.com addresses, so you can track your orders without having them interrupt you. You can be as complicated as you want.
OK, finally, back to Mail.app rules:
Most of the hard work is done at this point. Just set up a mail rule for each of the groups you spent all that time laboriously sorting out, and have each rule have a condition: "Sender is member of group: bacn: wine" perform the following actions: "Move Message to Zenbox; Set Color of background to Red; Set MailTags Keyword Add wine"
For project rules, have it set the project. Obviously.
Repeat, ad infinitum.
I use disabled rules with no actions to group the rules in the rule list, for instance, I go --- Spam Rules --- followed by --- Bacn Rules ---, and then --- Personal Rules ---, --- Location Rules --- and finally --- Project Rules ---, but do what you want. I'm not the boss of you.
The critical piece of the puzzle here is not the hours and hours you spend on the front end setting all this idiocy up.
No, the critical piece is that if you get a message in your Inbox, and it requires no intervention, action, caring, loving or even emotional indifference, figure out what rule it should be caught by, and add the sender to the right group. IF THERE IS NO GROUP OR RULE, MAKE ONE.
Yes, I now have a group, rule and smart mailbox called "Family". And I can look at those after work. Or on the weekend.
Also, if you ARE using email aliases, say through .me, set up rules for those too ... Use as much of the message metadata as you can to make sure that your inbox remains as EMPTY as possible.
For the messages that DO end up in your inbox, if you can't immediately deal with it, find one of the 5 @ tags, tag it, and move it out of the inbox. Come back and review it later that afternoon. Or the next day. Rands wrote about this recently. I go through my @action folder twice a day, @waiting about once every day or two, @hold every few days, @respond once a day and @review about once a day.
When you do this, make sure you can devote 15 or 20 minutes, clear out the low hanging fruit, re-prioritize and retag the remaining messages in that box, and move on.
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