Concern

As I’ve written about before, Lotus Notes is the email client I’m stuck with at work, and it’s a huge pain to get things done with it. I was inspired by Merlin Mann’s presentation on Inbox Zero at Google to try and do something about it.

This is what I’m trying:

First, I’ve created five folders into which all email will go, before I respond or even read them:

• Archived. This is for old stuff, things that aren’t important (corporate wafflegrams, Perforce notifications, etc.) and so on. Most things that make it to a different folder first go here once they are done.
• Do. This is for messages containing tasks I need to complete.
• Done. This is for messages for tasks that I’ve completed. The point of this is to keep a short archive of things I’ve done recently, and to give myself a nice psychological boost as I watch that list grow.
• Respond. These are messages that I need to respond to, but don’t otherwise involve me doing a task.
• Waiting. This is for things I’ve responded to, but am waiting for more info or another reply.

I’ve also taken the hint of not checking email very often. I’ve set the refresh time to 30 minutes, and turned off sound notifications when new mail arrives. I also am going to use Growl to pop up a notification every half hour, using this script:

notify-check-mail.sh
#!/bin/sh

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/bin

function destroy()
{
    rm -f /Users/csm/.being-notified
}

trap destroy 2

logger "notifying you to check mail..."

if test ! -f /Users/csm/.being-notified; then
    touch /Users/csm/.being-notified
    logger "Running notification..."
    growlnotify --wait --sticky --iconpath /Applications/Notes.app --message "" "Check Your Mail"
    rm -f /Users/csm/.being-notified
else
    logger "I'm already bothering you."
fi

logger "Bye now."

And I put this in my crontab:

0,30 * * * *    /Users/csm/bin/notify-check-mail.sh

And I added this to launchd:


<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
        <key>Label</key>
        <string>private.csm.mailnotify</string>
        <key>ProgramArguments</key>
        <array>
                <string>/Users/csm/bin/notify-check-mail.sh</string>
        </array>
        <key>StartInterval</key>
        <integer>1800</integer>
</dict>
</plist>


So every half hour, a Growl notification will pop up (but only if one isn’t already up) telling me to check my mail, and the notification will stay there until dismissed. Then I’ll filter any email that’s arrived into it’s its folder, and then process the things that have come in as I need to. We’ll see how this works. Already it’s satisfying to have a completely empty inbox, instead of one with thousands of unthreaded messages.

I wish that Growl had a sticky version of the Music Video notification, because that one is more prominent than any others, which bury themselves in the visual nowhere in the upper right hand corner.