For the past 7 years I have been fairly religious about clearing out my mailbox. Every time I took a holiday break, I’d set an email OOF and instruct recipients in no uncertain terms that upon my return I would archive all of my email and start fresh. This is important for a number of reasons:
- Coming back from a holiday with an overwhelmed inbox is no email at all.
- Nobody should have an expectation that you reply to email when you are on holiday. If you are that indispensable, you shouldn’t take holidays.
- Everyone should make sure they are dispensable… otherwise you wont get holidays.
But there are a couple of things I have been hoarding… Mailbox rules. Today, pre-purge, I had managed to accumulate around 74 email rules. In the past, this was a necessity to manage the constant inflow of DLs, CCs, FYIs and CYAs. But a couple of things have changed, particularly for Office 365 users:
Clutter
Clutter. The Office Graph, a sort of benevolent machine intelligence that lives in the dark recesses of the Office 365 cloud that makes statistical links between your emails, documents and interactions with other humans. One of the benefits of this “Graph” is that it starts to “learn” (identify statistical outliers) what emails you read, and which ones you tend to ignore. This essentially gives you a smart inbox, that introduces another “grey mail” level between junk and actual useful mail. Over time, clutter knows you ignore Jenny’s bake sale and Twitters social updates, but you are very keen on reading the Dell discounts catalog. Rules actually interfere with Clutter… Clutter needs to learn from you, but rules masquerade your habits. Over time, I expect the Office Graph to get smart enough to grok the inbox rules you have in place, but right now, to get the best experience, we have to make a leap of faith into the world of an inbox in anarchy and trust that order will emerge from the Chaos Theory patterns of your own particular style of usage.
Outlook for iOS
Outlook for iOS (‘nee Accompli) has a slightly different approach to Clutter, in the form of a “focused” inbox. This focused inbox essentially takes out all the newlsetters, social media updates (as an aside, all these social networks touting themselves as email killers seem to be sending me a whole lot of email) and impersonal email and lets you focus on the important ones. Outlook also supports the whole swipe to triage trope, which actually creates subfolders in your inbox to help categorize these activities. Again, rules can interfere with this.
So how will it end?
I predict it will end badly. 7 years of rules has actually given me some fairly sophisticated ways of dealing with email. But technology evolves, and some of my old ways have felt more and more like a crutch, than a coping mechanism. I am cautiously optimistic that these new tools will help me manage email better, and with any luck, I won’t need the complex system of rules and folders that has got me this far.
As for you… Isn’t it time you reevaluated your old inbox rules?
Superstratum 