Bijan Sabet

Thinking about simple inbox hacks

I took Thursday and Friday off this week and went away with lauren and the kids for an extended weekend. We are having a blast.

For the most part and except for a few unplanned work related things I’ve been off the grid.

Tonight, everyone was wiped out and went to bed early. I’m still wide awake.

I’m staring at my inbox getting back to the most important items (family, urgent portfolio company matters, my partners and very close friends).

But my inbox doesn’t care about me and it’s all there. And growing. And in no particular order. It only cares about the most recent stuff because that is what it “bubbles up to the top”.

Not nice.

Time of email receipt isn’t the most important thing for me right now.

At a glance my email inbox looks probably a lot like yours:

-tons of work emails

-personal emails

-calender invite emails

-blog comments (disqus)

-Twitter DMs

-social net messages (so & so wants to be your friend, social net messages)

-PhoneTag voicemail transcriptions

-ecommerce receipts & status

-spam

The list goes on.

I need a way to fix this and I’m not willing to declare email bankruptcy.

When I get back home I’m going to do some simple inbox improvements:

1. Create a separate email gmail account for my disqus comments. iPhone handles multiple email accounts beautifully.

2. Create a separate email account for phonetag. (is there a way to use iPhone visual voicemail and Phonetag at the same time? I think the answer is no on this one.)

3. Create a separate email account for ecommerce stuff.

4. re-configure twitter to send DMs to sms only

5. Right now my work and personal email goto the same place. wondering if that is a good idea or not.

6. since switching to gmail, spam has gotten lighter. but it’s still a problem.

7. can i filter gmail to show me only messages where I’m on the To: line (vs cc) ?

Please share any simple inbox tips. I’m sure I’m missing some obvious ones.

Maybe I’m tired too :)