Meta tagging emails, or using labels and tags to categorize and organize messages, can be more effective than filing them away in folders for several reasons:

1. Increased flexibility: Meta tagging allows you to assign multiple labels and tags to a single message, making it easier to find and access relevant information. This is especially useful if you’re searching for a message that pertains to multiple projects or topics.
2. Improved searchability: When you use metatags, you can search for messages using specific keywords or phrases, making it easier to find the information you need. This is much more efficient than manually searching through a series of folders.
3. Greater scalability: As the number of messages in your inbox grows, it can become increasingly difficult to manage and organize them in folders. With meta tagging, you can continue to add new labels and tags as needed, making it easier to scale your organization system as your email volume...

For many, managing an inbox is an agonizing Sisyphean task - or at least unpleasant and inefficient. But really, it's quite simple, and can be enormously efficient if you embrace three important concepts.

Before we get to those concepts, however, let's understand why you might reject the thesis that managing email could be simple. Nearly anyone reading this would immediately react with: Maybe for you, but you have no idea about the complexity and sheer number of emails I receive.  

And I would say, Ah, but after 15 years devoted to understanding email management as seen from those on the front lines of battle, and having worked with thousands of users form every company size and vertical imaginable, I have the qualifications to say, I do understand your situation.

Here's the thing, I agree that your work (decision making) may be complex: i.e. competing priorities and urgencies, intricate dependencies, never mind the strategic ways to request or submit responses is indeed...

Outlook is a tool; the Gmail platform is a tool.  Email is a medium. 

Many people refer to email as a tool, but it's not.  It's a medium just as books, CD’s, and letters are media.  You may not like managing email but that has less to do with the media itself and more to do with the process of managing it using current tools.  

Why it’s important 

Distinguishing the technology from the media is critical because by designating email as a tool we camouflage the problem connected with managing email, namely the outdated methods and technologies involved in handling the email medium.  In of itself, email simply provides us with the possibility to send, receive and archive messages, pictures, hyperlinks and attachments such as documents.  There is nothing inherently bad with that.  So, how did email get confused with being a technology, and why do even smart people, like Tim Denning, mock it and treat it with disdain?...

Do you receive a lot of non-core business email that you don’t consider spam? Email that falls into the gray space of not very important, but you want to keep anyway. Then Inbox480 is for you. It’s similar to Focus, but also quite different in that it gives you a lot more control over which emails are filtered, it doesn’t share the content of your emails with Microsoft, and it also cleans up after itself, so you don’t need to do regular purges. Check it out here.

Here is a link to find out more about LeanMail and to register for our Free LeanMail introductory workshop.

Michael Hoffman

Should Inbox Zero Be Your Goal? Probably Not.

Most of the blogs I read about being more productive with email focus on reaching inbox zero. No doubt, it’s a worthy cause, but is it the correct objective for you? Probably not.

Most people struggle with keeping their head above water, never mind capturing the holy grail of inbox management; and what does inbox zero really mean anyway? No emails in your inbox at all? Then what do you do with those mails that you simply can’t answer because you are waiting on someone else for a response? I think most of the zero pushers would say, Convert them into tasks or calendar items. What they mean by that is to go through an amazing amount of arduously administrative dragging, dropping and labeling acrobatics in order for you to proclaim, YES! INBOX ZERO! Honestly, I find that display of compulsivity to be beyond that of my Dutch aunt who used to clean her kitchen cupboards every single week. (Yes, she took out every pasta box, can,...

I can imagine being on the other end of being asked to send in the “snow” – your empty inbox at the end of the day with 0 to prioritize, 0 to plan and 0 Today. On first glance, this request may seem a bit over the top. I get it.

If you still feel that way after reading this, then, by all means, feel free to stop, but hopefully, this will shed some light on exactly why we request snowmails, and why exactly 20.

First, you should know that we call them snowmails because the objective is to have lots of white (snow) in your inbox.

Second, I want you to know that this service is for you. It actually takes up quite a bit of resources to monitor “the snow”, but we do it because our experience tells is it’s a game-changer.

Third, it might be helpful to know that before we started requesting snowmails many years ago, the level of adoption of our customers was just a little over 50%, and puzzlingly enough it didn’t matter how excited a...

Probably the biggest challenge novice LeanMailers face is writing proper Next Actions (NAs) that make an impact on your brain. When your NAs are generic, your brain struggles to remember what the NAs pertained to. The result, then, is an increase in time-spend, not a decrease — without any return on investment

The reason

Generic NAs don’t hook into your memory, which means that you spend time writing them without receiving time-savings in return. Good intentions going in, but pure rubbish going out.

This is easily solved by getting a better understanding of, and putting more focus on, the WHAT of your NAs. (Remember that a NA is made up of a Who – What combination.

Words like: action, apply, read, follow up, (verbs in general) are not hooks that snag your memory. You need Whats, which are typcially nouns.

Are you saying that we can’t use verbs 

It’s not that you can’t...