Postponing mails
Have you ever postponed a job one of your buddies sent you via mail and forgot it? Here’s what I do.
I often get that kind of emails saying “Hey, can you quickly do this and that for me?”. Usually, I can - but I don’t want to - at least not immediately. So what I do is, I postpone it and happen to forget it once it’s out of the first page of my GMail inbox. But there’s quite an easy way to prevent this from happening using a neat feature of the GMail web interface called labels. Labels are best described as virtual folders, or if you know iTunes (smart) playlists. The mails are not being moved from the inbox, but you can tag them with something.
I created myself two labels, one called ‘finished’ and one called ‘postponed’. Whenever I read a mail and consider the work attached to it to be finished I apply the label ‘finished’ to it, whenever I postpone some work I apply the label ‘postponed’. That way, I know at a glance in my virtual ‘postponed’ folder that there’s work left.
How do you manage your mail? Any suggestions on mail management? Tell me using the comment function.