Rule the Web (and Rule Your Email Inbox!)

I picked up Boing Boing editor and our pal Mark Frauenfelder's new book Rule the Web while browsing at my neighborhood Barnes & Noble a few days ago.

Now, I'm a pretty savvy web user (though a luddite when it comes to fancy gadgets) but I'm still pleasantly surprised at the breadth of useful information in the book. The cover of the book promises to tell you "how to do anything and everything on the Internet - better, faster, easier" and it delivers (funny if you think about it: it's a book about the Web, with actual paper pages!).

How useful is the book? Here's an example: Rule the Web has a chapter on how to obtain the elusive zero inbox - you know, to actually clear off your email inbox. Even a last-resort "email bankruptcy" option.

Having a zero inbox is a productivity-must. This I can speak from personal experience: it took me a long time to learn to tame the chaos that is my Outlook inbox. If only the book came out while I worked out a system through trial and error ...

I'll share with you my system, which is remarkably similar to Mark's (you'll have to buy the book to find out about Mark's unique color-coded sorting process) and other methods out there on the Web (for example, 43 Folders has a nice series of articles):

  1. Slot a dedicated email answering time
    This is the time to take care of your emails - answer them, delete them, file them, whatever. Depending on your needs, this may be as little as once a day or a couple of times a day.

    The rest of the day? Work, eat, sleep, whatever. Just don't obsess with checking your email.
     
  2. Open then Answer/Delete/File
    Don't re-read, leave it, then re-read your emails. Handle it once: answer it or delete it (or if you must, file it for reference). When in doubt, delete it. Yes, delete it.
     
  3. It's Okay to Answer with a One-Liner
    This is the biggest stumbling block in attaining zero inbox zen: in the beginning, I felt that it's impolite to answer a long missive from friends and family with just "Thanks, that's interesting" one-liner. However, the euphoria of having a zero inbox quickly obliterated all feeling of guilt and shame.

    Actually, I often reply with a short one-liner, and then stick a note to write an email, or better yet, call the person in my to-do list.
     
  4. Have a Simple Filing System
    Don't overthink this: a complex folder with subfolder system is not what you need to remain organized. Obviously, your particular needs will dictate how many folders you have ... but in my experience, you rarely, if ever, need subfolders.
     
  5. Have a Follow Up Folder
    There will be times that I need to research an answer to a particular email or do something before I can reply. I let these emails sit in my inbox for a maximum of 1 day (gasp!), then they get put into a Follow Up Folder if I haven't gotten around to them - and then I add an entry in my to-do list.
     
  6. Set Up a Keyword Filter
    Actually the four things above take care of 90% of my legitimate emails - the rest are usually emails from cranks or spam that I get tired of deleting over and over again.

    To make life easier, I set up three filters in my Outlook (all email softwares have this capability): one for the sender, another for the subject line and another for the body of the email, with instructions to delete the email if particular phrase are present.

    If for some reason my spam filter doesn't catch the same type of spam email - and this happens with regularity, I simply add a unique phrase from either the sender, subject line, or body of text into the rules above and poof - spam disappear automatically from the inbox.

Note: Something I haven't been able to do is set up a filter for those annoying PDF spam - if anyone know how to do this, please let me know!

So, pick up a copy of Rule the Web, start off by taming your email inbox, and move on to all the things you could do better on the Internet!


My copy of this book just arrived from Amazon yesterday, and I'm loving it. I'm not to the section on email yet though. I had a zero inbox once. It lasted until the weekend.
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PDF Spam. Add ".pdf" to your Subject filter. Legit email will rarely have .pdf in the subject. Now, if someone does a rightclick/send email on a PDF it does default to a subject of emailing xxx.pdf. So ymmv. I use Ironmail to filter spam for my company and found that by adding some points for .pdf subject I could push most of the spam over the threshold without getting too many false positives. ymmv.
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To filter JPG, GIF, or PDF spam, add a filter such as "If attachment is PDF and sender is not in my contact list or previous recipient list, delete it."

For banks and stuff, just write a blank e-mail to whatever address they send notices from and then it'll be in your "previous recipient" list.
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Chris, the book is not an MS manual at all. *I* just happen to use Outlook. The tip to tackle your inbox is largely mine - Mark's more detailed and better.

I do get valid JPG, PDFs, and other attachments from people not in my whitelist, so nuking everything with PDF is not feasible. So far, the problem is not so bad that I can't live with it.
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Mmmm, ok Alex... You didn't sell the book to me yet. I think. I'll need to check it [read it] at the book store. Maybe should I trust more a Neatorama approved item ? ;)
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One of the advantages of a brick and mortar bookstore, Chris! If you're a hardcore Internet user, then a lot of the stuff may seem basic - still, there are gems in that book.
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One other tip I've found useful- if you're using Outlook and are going to regularly file rather than delete, then set up a macro so that you can do so with one keystroke.
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The best email that will quickly accomplish the tasks listed in all of your tips is Gmail, except for #6 where the need for that one will no longer exist. The anti-spam do-dad is amazing.

The subfolder obstacle is eliminated since you can't create them anyway. You can label emails such as: todo, torespond, toresearch and so forth.

Yep, I love my Gmail and just cannot live without it.
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Thanks for the pointer and the great tips. Interestingly, tThe processing part sounds a lot like Stephanie Winston's TRAF system - Toss, Refer, Act (either now or later), and File. More here, if you're interested: How to process stuff - A comparison of TRAF, the "Four Ds", and GTD's workflow diagram - http://ideamatt.blogspot.com/2006/03/how-to-process-stuff-comparison-of.html).
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Now, the subject is no longer containing ".pdf", so our subject filter is failing. I setup a rule to delete all attachments, except when the body contains "a" "b" "c", etc. Put in all the alphabet and it deletes all emails with attachments that have nothing in the body, which combined with the subject rule for ".pdf" has gotten all the pdf's so far.
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I have like 500 emails sitting in my in box, and about 44 of them are not read. One problem I have is that I keep subscribing to ezines and rss feeds and forums, and need to get that under control.

But, I agree with the respond or delete plan. I need to just respond to the emails (even if it is one-liner), or delete them.

One problem with the Follow Up email folder (for responses requiring research, like for clients), is that I forget to open that folder, because I don't have the visual reminder (like the stack of emails in my Inbox).

Of course, that just means I need to not be a big baby and create a routine where I check that folder.

Thanks!
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