When I go through my inbox in the morning I usually have around 60-80
emails which have collected overnight. These are a mixture of system
messages from our servers, a small number of low volume mailing lists
which I want to see daily (mh-e, org-mode, linux-thinkpad), and the
rest are emails from people I work with (from the same organisation,
from other organisations within the NHS, or from our commercial
customers).

Using the two minute rule, I deal with each email using one of the
following options:

1. read and delete;

2. read and file (no further action required, but want to keep for reference);

3. read and reply (if can do in less than 2 minutes), followed by
   delete, file (for reference) or file for followup (see later);

4. file into @today folder for emails which I need to deal with but
   will take more than 2 minutes. When I have finished going through
   my inbox, the @today folder is usually the next one I look at as I
   know there are emails there which need dealing with;

5. file into +pending/tonight – usually personal emails I want to get
   out of my way so I can deal with them at home in the evening.

6. file into one of my pending folders – these are for emails which:

   a. I can’t do anything about now (for example, I need to be in
   the lab to deal with, and won’t be there for a few days);

   b. are time dependent (agenda for a meeting, which I want to come
   back to me the day before the meeting);

   c. I want to cogitate about (a difficult email I want to think
   about for a few days before replying)

   d. I’m waiting for a response on – for example, if I send an email
   asking somebody to do something, I either put a note into my
   lists for that person, so I can check the progress when I next
   see them, or I may think that I would like to see that email
   again in a months time back in my inbox.

Some ‘time management’ methodologies say that you should only handle
each piece of paper (or email) only once. However, I have no problems
with seeing emails (or pieces of paper in fact) multiple times – it is
no different from reviewing your lists on a weekly basis in my
opinion. I know that sometimes I will be smarter in a few weeks or
even a few months time, and want emails to be automatically picked up
from their pending location and popped back into my +inbox at that
stage. Therefore I set them to ‘incubate’ in one of my pending
folders, knowing that they will be brought to my attention at a time
of my choosing.

So with the principles out of the way, here is how I do this.

The following commands will set up your basic set of folders for you:

 folder -create +@today
 folder -create +pending
 folder -create +nextweek
 folder -create +tonight
 folder -create +tomorrow

 for (( f = 0; f < 32; f += 1 )); do
 folder -create +pending/d$f
 done

 for i in Jan Feb Mar Apr May Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct Nov Dec
 do
 folder -create +pending/$i
 done

 for i in Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
 do
 folder -create +pending/$i
 done

Using crontabs is the key to making all of this work.

This is my crontab:

 # m h  dom mon dow   command
 # minute (0-59) hour (0-23) day of month (1-31) month (1-12)  day of week 0-7 (0 or 7 is Sun)
 PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/bin/mh
 HOME=/home/pete
 # run this every saturday morning at 1:10 am
 # see http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/e-rmmer.html
 10 01 * * 6 /usr/bin/find /home/pete/Mail/DELETE -mtime +10 | /usr/bin/xargs /bin/rm
 #############################################################
 #  Mail Section
 #############################################################
 ### Each month, refile all the pending stuff back to my inbox.
 ### 1:10 on the first day of each month
 10 4 1  * * $HOME/bin/monthly-pending
 ### Each monday refile all the next-week stuff
 15 4 *  * 1 $HOME/bin/weekly-pending
 ### Each day also has its own pending - Saturday, Sunday etc
 20 4 *  * * $HOME/bin/day-of-week-pending
 ### Each date of the month (1-31)  also has its own pending - d1, d11, d31 etc
 25 4 *  * * $HOME/bin/day-pending
 ### Each night at 17:30 - refile all pending/tonight to inbox
 30 17 *  * * $HOME/bin/tonight-pending
 ### Each night at 12:30 - refile all +today stuff back to +inbox
 40 01 *  * * $HOME/bin/today-refile-to-inbox
 # Each day refile the tomorrow pending back to +inbox
 35 4 *  * * $HOME/bin/tomorrow-pending
 #############################################################
 # email reminders about checking the various daily files
 # (physical, not email folders) I need to check - the 31 folders.
 #############################################################
 35 6 * * * /bin/echo "Check your black folder - stuff for lab." | /usr/bin/nail -s "check black folder - stuff for work ?  stuff to file ? receipts for office etc ?" pete@smtl.co.uk
 35 6 * * * /bin/echo "Check your daily files." | /usr/bin/nail -s "check daily files" pete@smtl.co.uk
 # index mail every hour. YMMV!
 30 * * * * /usr/bin/mairix -f /home/pete/Mail/.mairix/config 2>/dev/null

Note that I also use the rmmer scripts so that when I delete emails,
they are actually moved to +DELETE, and only deleted from there when
they are 10 days old by one of the cron jobs.

http://rand-mh.sourceforge.net/book/mh/e-rmmer.html

These are very short shell scripts. You could proably stick them
directly into your crontab if you preferred.

So every day, I process my emails. I deal with emails in +@today later
in the day, but if I don’t get to them (something else comes up which
takes priority), they all get filed back into my +inbox during the
night. This is because the next day my priorities will have changed so
an email I thought I should deal with may now be one I need to delete.

If I file an email now (April) into +pending/November, then on the 1st
November, the crontab will refile it back into +inbox.

This is the same for all of the pending files – emails will stay in
the apporpriate folder until the crontab picks it up at the
appropriate time and dumps it back into +inbox.

If you have read GTD, you will probably recognise this as the 42
folders principle – each day you open the day folder and dump it into
your in-tray, and each month you dump the contents of that into your
in-tray and then process.

These are my other top level folders:

I belong to around a dozen mailing lists, some of which are high
volume. I don’t have these funneled into my +inbox – using sieve, they
go into list-specific folders on our imap server, and I scan them
around once a month. I would recommend that unless you belong to
mailing lists which are mission critical to your work or projects, do
not have them delivered to your +inbox, as it makes the processing
phase take way too long. You want to be able to process your +inbox
in 30-60 minutes if you can.

$Revision: 1.2 $