Email Productivity Tips and Tricks

Business Brain, the Show for entrepreneurs, episode 416 for Wednesday, January 18, 2023. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take our business brains and apply them to everything we can find in our lives. Because our lives are lived by one person, and that's us. And so, you know, we're doing our business and we're doing our personal stuff and. Yeah, yeah, all of that good stuff here for the moment, anyway. In Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

In Lafayette, California, coming to you from the first sunny day in a month.

That's a lot. Wow.

Yeah, that's good. 27 trillion gallons of water has fallen on California in the last 30 days.

Wow.

Trillion. Yeah. I don't know who they got to measure that and how they got it so quickly, but, you know, take it for what it's worth. It's a big number.

Yeah.

Pretty crazy.

That's a lot, man. Wow. Well, I mean, I guess that's good. I realize it. Yes, the velocity and time compression under which the rain came was very much not good for a lot of people. But, yes, getting all that rain, I suppose, is good. So, yeah, rain over snow.

Very, very. Yep. Snow particularly is really important because that's what California uses in the spring to trickle the water down into reservoirs. So without the snow, we're a little. It's a little tight here. And since our water system was built for about 15 million people and now there's about 41 million people. But this is not a show about water. So, no, we're not going to get into that.

Well, but it's a show about using our business brain. So I, I, you know, if there was somewhere. Yeah, yeah. I am curious, though. My, my rambles in the intro there reminded me of something that I did years ago that would dare. That very much was a, A use of my business brain. And that was realizing, of course, that I am one person, regardless of whether I am, you know, Dave from the Hamilton family or Dave from Backbeat Meteor or Dave from Business Brain or. Or Dave the drummer in Bitter Pill or Dave the drummer in Fling. Like, I'm just the one guy. And that realization made me decide to consolidate all of my email into one box. Now there are many addresses by which I can be reached, and that's so that I can put on the right face for each of our businesses and, you know, all of that stuff and the bands that I'm in. And of course, I have a personal email address as well, but they all come to one box. I'm I triage exactly one inbox. And it's because I realized I'm just the one guy. I'm gonna, you know, I'm gonna deal with these things as I deal with them. So I'm curious. You. It sounds like you. You don't do that.

No, I want to. I do want to talk about this. Apologies for my dog barking.

Oh, that's crying.

But he's in here today for. For various reasons. So when you reply, do you have. You then have to select the from who you're replying, which account you're replying from when you send it back.

In theory, I need to be mindful of that. Yes. Apple's mail clients. And when I say clients, because they are ON Mac and iOS and iPhone and iPad, they do a fantastic job of choosing the from address to match the to address of the email from which I'm replying. But if I'm sending out a brand new email email, then yes, I need to be mindful of what address that's coming from. That is so ingrained in. I was going to say my workflow. It's ingrained in my system psyche. Yeah, yeah. That is a fundamental system for me. So it's really just not a big deal. I mean, you also need to choose the from address when you send a new email out. You probably just do it by choosing the mailbox first.

Yes, yes, that's correct.

But you're also mindful of it because otherwise for Shannon's Closet, you'd be sending an email out from Business Brain. And not that that's the worst thing in the world. Correct. You know, but. But you like to compartmentalize, at least on the surface. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I. I do it. And this is really worth talking about because it's about time and productivity and everything else.

Exactly.

Glad you brought this up. The way I separate them is really. I'm not consistent with this either. So I was going to say personal and business. Right.

Yeah. And I don't even know what that means anymore, but. Exactly right.

And I also have. But I do have different ones that I do. I use some services that I'm just. Well, I guess I could forward them all to each one, but that's what.

I do is I forward them all to one. I have one inbox to rule them all, man. And yeah, I will tell you, it is. It is one of the best things I've ever done. For me, I'm not saying that this universally is the only way. Right. But I know that for me, the way I Can be distracted by things. If I had to go through five effing inboxes every day.

If you had to pick a number, how many emails would you say? Not, not just come in but emails that you. That require your attention. How many per day are you interacting with? If you had to guess like in.

Terms of either like taking action other than deleting or filing the email, is that not fair?

Doesn't count because yeah, I would say something that let's. It could even be something that. Yeah. Some sort of action you had to.

Some action.

Call someone, reply, even just replying to that. How many would you say per day.

That I'm actually taking action on? Yeah, I'm going to say on an average day, 20 to 40. I was going to say 30. But some days it's less, some days it's more but you know, it's. It's in that range. Yeah.

Yeah. I probably. I'm thinking the same thing. Like how many would I have and how do I keep it?

I could be very wrong. That's a, I mean that is a number I pulled out of my. Out of the thin air.

Yeah.

I mean, you know, well, thinking about.

It, I do have some accounts forwarded to a Gmail account that I use all the time. I do have, you know, some other ones that are kind of tied in and so I can't say I have a consistent system. It's just been kind of set up over. Probably over time and maybe. I don't know. Well, I shouldn't say I've used it for years. But the Apple Mail is not my. I, I use it because I have certain accounts that go in there.

Yes.

But all the features that, that like I use air mail or airmail 2 I guess on the Mac and I really love it.

You're talking about Air. Oh, Airmail the, the app. The app. Yeah. I think that only works with Gmail. Right. Or is that that not the case anymore? Okay.

No, it'll work with. It works for my like my Shannon Gene dot com. It works with anything.

Okay.

But it has a ton of stuff and, and I have various mailboxes and that kind of thing. But yeah, it's really. That is a really interesting concept of coming into one. I guess I could do a two week. One of your two week experiments and.

See, I mean if you're doing that two week experiment, you are. It's a lot. You're doing it just to trick yourself. Because going back even from one, from day one of that would be trouble. Yeah. I mean, well, I guess it's not that terrible. You're going to put in, expect to put in an hour just to go through your, you know, five or six email accounts, set up all the forwardings and then what you need to do. And this is a critical part of this. You were whatever your one inbox, wherever that lives, it needs. You need to be able to reply and send mail from multiple addresses from that box. Google is great.

That was the first thing that got me.

Yeah, Google's great for this. I, and I used Google as my, you know, even just a regular Gmail account will do that. No problem. I used Gmail to do that for a very long time, two or three years ago.

I'll do that now.

Okay, so you're fine there. Apple's icloud will not do that. You can reply from a custom domain that you add to it, but only one. And it needs to be the home for your custom domain. So it's not like they have like an ability to send. As another thing, I use Fast Mail as my primary inbox these days, and Fast Mail does allow for that. It's a very flexible email service, much geekier than even I use. And I say that in a good way. Like they have their, they have a great web interface for creating mail filters. And if for whatever reason, and I, I really don't even know what this reason would be, but if for whatever reason, that's not flexible enough for you, you can literally write scripts to tell your mail what to do, which is amazing for like filtering and things like that.

Well, I started and I. Well, go ahead, go ahead.

And I, and I was going to say I do use some filters. In fact, I would say I rely heavily upon filters. I have some, like we all have, I'm sure that I've created that are very specific to my workflow. And then I do use a service called SaneBox that grabs all of the kind of newsletters and puts them into a newsletter folder. And it does this intelligently for me. I can tweak it, but it, it's, it's pretty smart about what it does. So that allows me. But really all that's doing is allowing me the power of triaging the stuff that is important versus at one time and stuff that is not so important at. At a different time. It just allows me to sort of bifurcate my triaging. But I would need to do that for five accounts, if I had five accounts. You know, it's like I get a lot of.

Sanebox just runs and runs in the Background. It's a service that you filter the mail through.

Yeah. SaneBox actually logs into your mail server as another client. It's a, It's a service that acts as a mail client. It uses IMAP for folks who know what IMAP is for mail. Yep. So it logs in just like, you know, your, your mail, like your airmail does on your, you know, that, that client or your mail on your phone or your, you know, your computer, whatever. It logs in and watches everything that comes in and watches what you do with it too. Because if I take some. If it filters something into like the newsletters box, and I say if I don't want that to be in the newsletters box ever again, all I have to do is drag it to my inbox and SaneBox will see that I did that and train it just for me. It doesn't change your training for those emails. It changes, you know, just for that one user, me. So.

Okay, so. So two things for me is I've kind of fallen. I. I realized it's a good time to discuss this because my, my system has kind of become overburdened of late. I've realized that as I'm working with all this data and I'm about to launch something else, something new that'll require even more input of, of emails and things. So it's, it's a good time to have this topic.

Yeah.

And so the question I have now is. My question is, okay, so I find I, I still. And, and may. Maybe I'm the only person left on the planet that does this, but I often kind of use my email box as a to do list.

Same.

And I used to. Okay, but the question is, are you getting to like, inbox zero? Are you getting rid of.

That's, that's, that's an insane.

I'm glad to hear you say that.

Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, but I do. So I triage my mail. I mean, I probably triage it more times per day than I should it like. Right. Which is why having one inbox is at least better than having five that I'd be triaging all day long but once per week. And I have it on my calendar for Tuesdays. On Tuesday mornings, I spend, you know, 30 to 40 minutes, whatever it works out to be. I sort my inbox by. Normally I'm sorted by the date that it was sent. And for me, for people who really care, I can't imagine this matters, but maybe it does. Um, I have the most recent stuff at the top. I know people who do the, the opposite. Like, whatever, it doesn't matter. For those 30 or 40 minutes on Tuesday mornings, I sort my mail by who it's from. And sometimes I sort it alpha through, you know, A through Z, sometimes Z through A. And there's a reason for this. And I try to alternate weeks and I go through everything and I. That's where I, I know I'm not going to get to Inbox 0, but in for the, that type of thing where it's like, let me just clean up whatever I've left as cruft in my email box, right. I'm going to go through and, and catch all the things that I might have missed because sorting by date sent, you know, like at the moment, it's, it's. And I didn't do this this morning because this is a weird week for me. I'm traveling. I did it yesterday, but I've got maybe 30 things in my inbox now. Most of them, I would say, you know, 20 of them. And I might maybe have 40 things in my inbox. So 30 of them are this year. Right. And today's the 17th recording of the 17th. It's going to release on the 18th. The rest, some of them go back to 2019. These are things that I know. Like, it's like, I know why I still have it there. You know, I haven't punted on that particular project yet, but it's just not important. So it's, it's not there. Right. But. But I do that thing on Tuesdays to make sure I haven't missed anything, first and foremost, because it's possible for something to just get lost in the shuffle of a, of a crazy week or whatever. And I don't like that when things do. So at this way, at the very least, it's, you know, a full week and I catch it, I'll see it. And then the others is if it's a part of a bigger project that maybe I have intentionally, you know, moved past and it's like, nope, okay. And on Tuesdays I will either, if I can, I will just address these emails as I'm going through them, which is why I alternate between A to Z and Z to A. Because by the time I'm more than halfway through, you know, my pace increases and my patience decreases. Right. So, yeah, yeah. You know, I just, I want to be able to give things time, time. So those of you in the, in the middle of the Alphabet, I'm sorry, you know, you never get prioritized, but that's okay. But yeah, I, I, I'll go through and either address it in the moment or if I haven't by that point and I know it's something I want to do, I'll add it to my to do list and be like, okay, here's, I'm gonna, you know, or I even put it on my calendar, like, okay, this afternoon or, you know, on Wednesday or something. At 2 o', clock, I'm gonna go through and dig into this whatever thing it is. But yeah, so I do use my, my inbox as a, you know, as a to do list, just like most of us do, I think.

I think so. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, not as special as I think.

No, but the one inbox, man, like, it is.

I'm gonna have to, I'm gonna have to get it going because I, I agree that I have.

My life isn't. I can't bifurcate my brain. No, I can't bifurcate. I mean, I shouldn't bifurcate my attention, but I certainly can't bifurcate my person. And, and so true.

But you, like, I'm thinking about your. Everybody's unique, you know, Everybody's a special snowflake. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so I'm trying to figure out, okay, my business here. How can I deal with that? How do I deal with this? This. It's kind of interesting in this new area, you know, time of my life where I'm a solopreneur again.

Again.

It's like, you know, versus having a bunch of people working for me like I have for the last, you know, 25, 30 years.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, but, but I, I'm definitely, I'm gonna put some effort into this and I'll come back and report, okay, how it worked out really well, or it was a complete disaster and I'll blame you for it.

No, you totally should blame me. I mean, here, here's the thing. You, you are, you are a productive person. I, I don't, yeah. Like, I'm not, you know, puffing you up, telling you that I know you know that, but clearly your system is not so terribly broken that it's, it's detrimental. And in fact, your system, for you, might be better than the one inbox to rule them all. So it's possible that you'll head down this path and be like, I don't know what's up with Dave, but I think he's an idiot. You know, how, and, but I doubt that.

But you never know. Well, but if, but I would say Productive. But I think there's certainly a question of efficiency.

And I'm an efficiency maniac. Yeah, exactly. That's the only way I can be productive is to be efficient.

If I can make it more efficient and easier to deal with. And. But see, sometimes, like one of the things that I'm thinking of as we've had this discussion which we weren't planning on having. So this is just.

No, I had benefit of ourselves. I had another topic that Shannon doesn't even know about that I was going to talk about. And then we, we. I fell into this actually have show and we.

And then after that we actually have show topics. But we'll get to those.

Yeah, that's right.

But like I have some accounts that I only keep on my computer, which forces me not to access that information when I'm away from my desk.

Okay.

And that's a really good system for me. So I may, I will.

Because I'm, I should be. Be transparent here. There is one exception to this, and it is the questions that come into my Mac Geek Gab podcast that does go into a separate inbox. And, and I carve out time and I could, I do actually have them come into a separate inbox. That's just because it was the easiest way for me to be certain about filtering things. But I could just as easily do it with filters. But they, they never hit my main inbox. They hit a separate inbox that I look at at very specific carved out times. Because to go through those, I need to be in a very different mindset and I need to be sort of heads down.

It makes sense.

But if they came into my inbox, I would just file them as soon as they came in and then go do them at a certain time. So I just automated that part of it. That's all. Yeah, yeah.

Okay. And you like Fast Mail. Fast Mail is not in the App Store. Huh? It's.

Oh, no. Fast Mail is not an app. Fast Mail is a service. Fast Mail is my mail host. That's what my mail comes into. So instead of say Gmail, I use Fast Mail. Yes.

And then you use the what client. Are you accessing it all?

Apple Mail client. I use Apple's default mail. Well, I have a whole rant about that. I used to use third party email clients. Third party email clients other than like Apples and maybe Thunderbird, although I'm not certain about this. Email clients are written to scratch the itch of their author. That's like. I've learned this. I've learned more about Rich Siegel from Bare Bones Software by using his I don't think it's still in existence mail client called Mailsmith than I have sitting down and having like hours long conversations with him. You can learn a lot about somebody by getting into how they manage email and how they think the right way is. Every third party email client is very particular about the way it does things. That's not bad or good, it just is. And the problem is every third party email client is basically at the mercy of that author to keep building it and changing email clients. It used to suck a lot more than it does right now. Now it's like because it's all server based, it sort of matters a lot less. But I hated when I had to change from Eudora to Mailsmith and I hated it even more when I had to change away from Mailsmith. And it was at that point that Mac OS X was coming out, or OS X I guess they called it at the time. And I was like, that's it. I'm just going with Apple's client. I'm guaranteed as long as I'm using an Apple computer that Apple will continue making this client and I won't have to migrate to another email client for as long as I shall live. And that's why I use mail.

Fascinating. Okay, well, we're all about systems here on Business Brain, right? We're constantly trying to make things better, more enjoyable, more productive without taxing your brain. So come, you know, send us an email, tell us what system for the massive influx of email that we know you are getting. Tell us what system you're using. Feedbackusinessbrain show and remember, if we talk about email, your email or mention it on the show, you'll be entered to win a MacBook.

Absolutely. And Shannon, if you do wind up trying this, or any of you, if you switch to this and find out you like it, sure, let us know. Feedbackusbrain Show But I'm really interested to hear if you don't like it and especially if you find it less efficient than your current system. Tell me, I want to know because I, I, if it's, there's a, if there's a more efficient system, I'm going to change to it. So I want to know. Thanks for listening folks. Feedback BusinessBrain Show MacBook Air Keep Living that charmed life. See you next time.