💩 I'm using Filters to move shit from my email Inbox to a place I can visit later
When emails in the Inbox are necessary, but not relevant
This is not about stopping spam (hit “Report spam”) or unwanted email (click “unsubscribe” somewhere at the bottom). This is about seeing only the email I want to see right that moment.
I open my email Inbox for the day sometime in the afternoon. When I look at the sidebar for the unread count, I’m hit by a very large number. A number that is entirely too large for me to handle in 30 to 40 minutes.
So I’ll create a Filter, or two. A Filter tells my email service how handle emails that fit some criteria. The service actions the Filter automatically when an email arrives. For example, email from the How I Built This podcast gets the “stories” Label, and then is removed from the Inbox. Email from a service I use to handle security updates for my personal blog gets a different label slapped onto it, and also disappears from the Inbox.
With Filters removing many emails from my Inbox, the email I see every day when I visit that Inbox is mostly relevant to my daily activity. The rest of the emails stay, unread, in different spaces. I go visit those spaces, and so process those emails, only when I choose.
Creating Filters that apply a Label, then remove from the Inbox
I set the Filters to selectively slap Labels onto emails and remove them from the Inbox. I used support guides to create Filters (in Gmail, in Outlook). Gmail calls them Labels. Outlook calls them Folders. They’re just names for different views.
When a Filter labels an email, I also set it to “Archive” that email. “Archive”-ing an email removes it from the Inbox. If I didn’t Archive the email, it would show up in the Inbox and when I visit the Label space.
Labels let me create, in effect, a separate inbox for emails that fall into that group. Using Labels, I personally try to group emails in a way that processing them doesn’t need too much context switching. A few of my Labels are:
- stories: for podcasts and newsletters
- nodejs: for Github email notifications related to my work on the Node.js project, and any other email related to Node.js
- shows: for alert emails when musicians and I would see live are coming to town :-)
I visit the Label’s “inbox” directly, without seeing the main Inbox
In Gmail, you are able to use its URL to go directly to the “inbox” for that label. You can do the same in Outlook. ProtonMail doesn’t yet support this.
So I can bookmark a link to the Label space, and use that bookmark to see all the emails currently marked with that Label.
In Gmail, It would look something like: https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#label/[your-label]
When I’m done with that email, I remove the Label. Removing the Label removes the email from the Label space, so I don’t see it anymore!
What Calm looks like now 😌
When I’ve got things set up right, my Inbox only shows emails that are relevant to the current day’s activity. Everything else should go into separate spaces.
Many emails are not urgent enough to demand our attention daily. I visit these other spaces, and so feel the burden of their emails, only when I want. The “stories” label, which has podcasts and newsletters, gets seen once a week. The “nodejs” label gets visited a few times a week, but not every day.
In future, I’ll write about deciding when and how to remind myself about visiting these filtered emails.
For now, check out a previous post about when to say “No”!
Thanks for reading all the way through! Let me know what you think, by replying to the email. Otherwise (at)me on Twitter or Mastodon.