How to simplify email, newsfeeds and other digital streams…
Make your Gmail account your main address and set up a forwarding to that gmail account from other addresses.
Decide if you want to keep email on their own servers or delete them after forwarding. Alternatively your can set up additional POP3 accounts on your gmail account to pull emails directly from your other sources.
Set up an email address at your own domain (‘alquier.org‘ for me) as stable address, forwarding to Gmail. Good for resume, long term contacts.
In Gmail, go to Settings -> Configure Inbox, and set up tabs for Primary, Social, Updates and Forums. Train the system to use the right tab in case of false positives (drag email to the tab for training). Keep Primary for real important emails, Social for updates about networks, Update for everything else (ads, alerts, invoices, etc) except for high traffic mailing list and forums, which go into Forums.
Create your own system of tags / categories in gmail inbox. Keep it as simple as possible.
I use ‘Inbox zero’ tags and regularly keep my ‘Primary tab inbox’ as clean as possible by sending emails to one of these categories. I treat the other tabs as feeds and look at them when needed.
- This week
- This month
- Waiting for
- Later
- To buy
- To watch
Be ruthless in moving emails from one category to another. Update ‘This week’ weekly / ‘This month’ monthly
Create additional tags based on your main interests. Mine are:
- CREATE
- PLAY
- WORK
It is useful to organize my bookmarks, blogs, Feedly sources according to these categories.
Useful tools
Web services / Chrome extension
- Diigo / Delicious : Bookmarking and tagging interesting sites to find them later (reference).
- Pocket: To funnel long articles to read from multiple places.
- Feedly : News aggregator for short articles. Subscribe all your news sites, RSS feeds to a single place
- Evernote : Use it to capture all your notes. Evernote works better when you make the choice to use it for everything
- Dropbox : Universal storage across multiple platforms. Good for quick file exchange between devices.
- LastPass : Central password / account management system. Great to keep track of many accounts.
iPhone apps
- Coach.me (formerly Lift) : iPhone app to train yourself into new habits. Includes good walkthrough / plans to be more efficient
- Mailbox : Better mail interface with improved flow to get through your mail faster (I would love to use it more on mobile but the lack of a quick delete option is a huge roadblock).
- Tempo : Daily tasks and calendar
- Clear : Quick to-do list. Good complement to Evernote.
- Zite : Good complement to Feedly. Helpful to dig news from sources you don’t know about.
Resources
- See David Allen: www.davidco.com/ for more details about GTD practices
- Watch this TEDx talk: www.youtube.com/watch?v=CHxhjDPKfbY
Read more about Inbox Zero – inboxzero.com/. The categories listed above are my own version of inbox zero. I found it works better for me than the official ‘Inbox Zero’ doctrine 🙂
Read ‘The 4 Hours week’ for more efficiencies and mental systems.
Howard Rheingold and Amy Burvall for Digital Literacies