My email solution

Searching my email doesn’t really work for me. This explains why it’s hard. If it’s hard for you too, here’s what I’ve done. It may or may not work for you.

First, I tried hey.com. In the end I decided it was too expensive for what it offered–but I picked up some interesting ideas that you can implement in Gmail itself. I deleted most of the folders I had created in Gmail, and instead reorganized around a small select group of folders:

• Blogs - all essays, editorials, and blog-ish kinds of subscriptions
• News - all news articles go (I receive probably +150 to 200 daily).
• Notifications - e.g. “New subscription to Roundup!”
• Paper Trail - for anything financial (e.g. receipts, bank notifications, bills)
• Travel - anything to do with travel gets labeled here too (even if also in paper trail).

These folders help me increase the probability of finding really key things I’m looking for. The Atlantic article linked above explores why it’s hard to find my airplane ticket. Moving them into paper trail, and then into travel, when they come in, helps me insure I’ll find them - or at least give me a much smaller haystack to search in.

Reducing the number of folders to these six means I have to “think less” about which folder something goes into. Generally, if it’s going into a folder, there should be a rule that gets automatically applied. I shouldn’t have to manually do it. (The only exception is the Travel folder—but even here, I have a number of rules I’m starting to apply for things like Expedia, etc.)

Second, I began numbering my outbound correspondence. You may have noticed if you get an email from me that there’s a number at the bottom (usually) - e.g. “2312.02.” It’s a simple numbering scheme: YearMonth.EmailNumber. I manually index these in a Note file for each month. Now, you may think “I send way too many emails to do that.” I thought it too - but then I realized, I don’t actually send that many outbound emails that I’ll need to come back to later. I don’t number every outbound email - just the ones I think I might need to look up again. In November, I had 38 of those. August was my high month: 152.

Why do this? Because it’s a LOT easier to do a search for a specific email number (e.g. 2308.152—I just searched for it, and it returns the very specific email) than to try to find an email from a person or an email about a topic. Plus, I can go back and scan my email files, and see who I’ve talked to, and about what subjects, in any given month.

YMMV from these hacks, of course. If you’ve got other working hacks, I’d love to hear them. Send an email to justinlong@gmail.com.