On the brink of Inbox Zero

mailboxes out of control

I have been interested for a while in the Getting Things Done productivity methodology, but one thing that has stood in my way is my email. I have email messages that date back to 1993 in my archives. When I was in grad school I had separate mail folders for every class I was in, plus every club, plus … And as you can see from the screen cap on the right, it hasn’t gotten any better.

Enter Merlin Mann, whose 43 Folders site ran some recommendations this week on how to live with just a single mail archive folder. The one that I’m particularly keen to try is Mail Tags. I don’t think I could live in iPhoto without tagging; wish I could do the same in iTunes; and have been aching to try it out in Mail since forever. So we’ll give it a shot and see how we do.