|
Since the 1990s I've been using Pine, Elm, Emacs VM, Mutt and/or Neomutt for mail, with Procmail for filtering mailing lists into folders. Over SSH, in a terminal window. These days Notmuch with Neomutt, with the occasional forwarding to Gmail to view HTML mails if they really need it (although I have other ways to view HTML mails too). I also forward things like invoices and receipts into data processing scripts that populate accounting databases for a couple of businesses, and manually check or fill out data linked to those. I used to read a huge amount of mail, in particular most of linux-kernel and gcc-devel, and other things like that. Eventually it got burdensome to keep up, about 1000 mails/day incoming, and taking about 1 hour every day of fairly intense skipping through. For a while I started to find mail traumatic. It was because of one, then another, person being abusive and pushy to the point that handling their mail was taking too much time and stressing me, on top of difficult personal experiences (partner illness, bereavement etc). As a result, I stopped reading mail regularly for a while. Naturally this had some unfortunate effects, and it put me off doing tasks that needed doing. This was transformed when I started using Notmuch to filter mails, with the default filter being "everything in the last 1 hour", and two secondary filters: "all work mails in the last 7 days" and "all non-list mails addressed to me in the last 24/48 hours". Even while the trauma issues continued, this one change transformed how I deal with mail, and it meant even when I felt tired I could approach little tasks that involved immediate emails quickly, instead of putting them off; and improved keeping on top of work and related things. That won't apply to everyone, but it transformed my productivity with mail when I wasn't coping, and I suspect a similar time-based filtering can transform productivity for someone who is coping ok, but finding the quantity of mail, or their "ever expanding todo list stored in email", to be putting them off dealing with it. Notmuch indexing and searching has also transformed how I file mail. I used to store mail from different people or organisations in separate folders. That by itself turned out to be quite a bit of grind every day (don't dare take a holiday!). Now I tend not to file mail, so much as add new search filters, which I add to auto-tagging scripts. When I add a new search filter, it isn't just used for new mails (as Procmail is). Updating filters re-tags older mails as well. One of these days I will link my search-tagged mail to an app (of my own) on my phone so that I get notifications for "important stuff", but nothing else. For the moment, I avoid mail notifications, and take a look when I feel like it, every few hours, or when I'm expecting something. If something's important and time-sensitive (like a server alert - I look after a number of critical services), it's linked to SMS as well as mail, so I won't miss an alert. And people know to call me if something is time-sensitive. |