To wrap up (Time) Management March (I just came up with that name! Where was it 3 weeks ago?), I thought I’d share with you a huge issue I used to have: Attack of the Emails.

To combat my attacker, I found that filtering emails & putting unurgent (I think I made that word up) emails in folders before they come in has allowed me to stay more focused when I’m online. Of course, nothing beats only opening up the site you need without opening up any other tabs (ie if you know you’re going to look for freelance writing work from 3-3:45p, don’t open up Gmail to just “see” what comes in during that time), but sometimes that discipline is too much! How can you resist when your Gmail tab says “Gmail (37)”? You can’t. But you can stop the Gmail tab from counting in the first place. Ah yeah.

When an email comes in that I know I would want to filter in the future (ie an unurgent one), I pull down the More Options dropdown and choose “Filter messages like these:”

I then just leave what has been filled in (the sender email) and click “Next Step”:

I then check “Skip the Inbox” and “Apply the label: (Choose label via dropdown)” and finally click “Create Filter”:

You’ll then notice that, the next time an email from this sender comes in, it goes right to that folder while bolding it & providing the number of new emails that are there:

Notice that Twitter (1) is bolded? Yeah you did.

Then, when it’s “check email” time, you can go to that label and see what’s there.

I also find it helpful to utilize delicious to keep track of the websites/reports/articles that I know will be helpful in some aspect of my life (blogging, ezines, website design, home decor) but I’m not looking to learn about at that moment in time. Say you get an email from a marketer talking about putting together a publicity package. “This is great!”, you think. “I’m going to need that for my cabaret show….eventually!” Instead of actually reading the article and hoping to retain the info, or even filing it in an email folder somewhere, just save it to delicious! When you sign-up for an account it will walk you through how to bookmark a site, and you can add whatever tag you’d like. Then, in a week or 10 or 62, the article will be there when you’re ready to put together your publicity packet!

Easy breezy (beautiful Cover Girl), right? Right?!

Right.

Oh, and for those that don’t have Gmail….uh….you can probably figure out how to do this on your hotmail or AOL or yahoo. But seriously, you should sign up for Gmail. Look, I have ninjas on mine!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 11:00 pm and is filed under Happy Hooplah. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.