GTD With POPfile and Mail.app
I know that this is not the next part of my Directory Structure series, but unfortunately things got in the way and so I wasn’t able to finish part two up. Sorry about that, I will have it ready for next week. But for today I finished up another quite interesting topic. Just read on, this is a quick one.
As there seems to be an ever growing demand in streamlining your productivity and in David Allen’s “Getting Things Done”, I thought I’d show you how I set up my E-Mail client (Mail.app in this case, but doable with any client that supports either smart folders or normal folders), so I get a very fast and pretty automated GTD solution. This solution is based on several posts from 43 Folders, Lifehacker and Hawk Wings with a little bit of my own spin.
What you need
For this little setup I use:
But of course, you can use basically any mail client that supports custom headers, some kind of tagging and smart folders — Thunderbird comes to mind, as it is cross-platform and open source and it has all the features we need (some as optional extensions).
POPfile is an extremely flexible mail filter, that not only works as a nearly perfect spam filter, it also filters an arbitrary amount of additional categories. And it also is cross-platform and open source. Great, isn’t it?
How do I set it up?
Well, I have POPfile filtering my mail into the basic categories:
- personal
- babylondreams
- other work
- sparetime
- spam
POPfile writes these categories in the mail header and I filter in Mail.app according to these POPfile headers. But everything except my spam stays in the inbox. Spam goes in a separate spam folder for further review and occasional reporting to SpamCop — a task that gives me a satisfying grin, knowing the bad spammers get a slap on their hands from time to time.
So what happens to the rest? I have several Smart Folders set up to show me:
- my POPfile categories (so I can view my mail in categories instead of actions)
- untagged and unclassified mails - @Inbox
- mails that I have to process somehow - @To Respond
- mails that are not interesting right now but maybe later - @Deferred
On top of that I have three archive folders:
- Archive
- Accounts Info
- Receipts
And the result looks similar to this:
Rules, Categories and Tags
Now we get to the real automation. I set up a bunch of rules for the Smart Folders and some shortcuts to tag my mail and move it to the archive when necessary.
The individual screenshots show the rules for the individual folders.
And then we have the Mail-Act-On rules, which allow me to have my mail tagged as actionable or deferred for a week. And of course I can move my stuff to the archive where it is save for the future if required. And all that at the stroke of a key, instead of drag&drop.
That’s all folks!
Pretty easy to set up and very fast an easy to maintain.
If you take a close look at the first screenshot, you see that I also have a Smart Folder showing me very old mails (older then 3 months), so I can keep my archive clean and tidy.
As I said, this was a quicky, so if anything is unclear or you want more detailed instructions, please let me hear about it. The comments section is open for your opinions.