RSS Feed and E-Mail Overload: Similar Problems
October 12th 2007 18:51
Many Thanks for Your Feedback!
I'd like to thank everyone for all your excellent feedback on feed-reading. It's been very helpful! You've given me some great ideas that will help make my feed management easier and more productive; and hopefully your comments have been helpful to other readers, who may have been experiencing some of the same issues, as well.
Feed Readers: Tools to Make Our Lives Easier
Feed reading is really a very convenient way to "visit" the blogs we enjoy--without having to surf all over the internet to find them. Having them all in one place is a great feature. When we look at feed readers as tools to help make our lives easier, we won't feel enslaved to them, but will use them in the ways that prove most helpful to us. If that means deleting posts that we haven't had time to read, so be it. If it means deleting entire blogs that we never read, we shouldn't feel guilty about doing so. The feed reader is there for us, after all.
Feed Readers and E-Mail: Both Benefit from Labelling
I still haven't tried labels in my feed reader, yet, but will do so as soon as I can find the time. Lately, I've been concentrating my energy and effort on labelling my e-mails in G-mail. I'd never used this feature before, and so organizing my saved e-mails has been pretty time-consuming. Just as my feed reader has become overrun with posts, my e-mail account has become overloaded with e-mails. Using my account for writing-related queries and submissions, church writing projects, and miscellaneous blog-related activities--in addition to everything else--has caused my inbox to be fairly inundated with mail; therefore, e-mail labelling was my area of concentration yesterday.
Labelling: A Big Job Once E-Mails Get Out of Hand!
So far I've only completed the e-mails that were in my inbox--though I spent a good part of the day doing it. (I told you my inbox was overloaded!) I have yet to tackle the ones in the archives. Since so many of my e-mails are writing-related, I really need to keep accurate records of my online correspondence, so I wouldn't want to delete those; though I'm sure there are some individual e-mails--and no doubt entire categories, as well--that I could probably live without. I'll have to give that a bit more thought.
Clear Out Your Inbox By Labelling and Archiving
I'd definitely like to begin keeping the number of messages in my inbox down to a manageable level, and I think labelling and archiving will help me do this--though I realize that I do need to rethink which e-mails I really need to save, as my archives continue to grow. All I can say is that it's a good thing G-mail offers close to 3,000 MB of storage. It's hard to believe, though, that with all the e-mails I've got archived, I'm only using 3% of that space! (This makes me realize that G-mail gives me plenty of space for letting things get out of hand--or should I say "plenty of rope to hang myself"?) So I'm the one who needs to decide when enough is enough--because G-mail certainly won't do it for me! (When G-mail was first launched, it offered 2,500 MB of storage space, and that amount has grown daily, until now it's over 2,900 MB!)
Minimize Archived E-Mails: Print/Delete Some of Them
One thing I've begun doing to get rid of excess e-mail is printing out the e-mails received from family members and then deleting them. This way, I have hard copies which I can keep, just as I would if a family member had sent me a letter via snail mail. This works well for me, since I generally bring them over to my mom's house to read them to her and share the latest family news.
I print out other select categories of e-mail, as well. This does, of course, use up more printer ink--not to mention paper--but that's simply the price one must pay for the added convenience of the practice. (No doubt most of us have quite a few e-mails we could simply delete--without printing--and we wouldn't really miss them. We all need to decide for ourselves which ones those are.)
What Are Your E-Mail Practices, Tips, or Techniques?
How do you handle your e-mail? Have you been able to tame the e-mail monster, or are you becoming buried in electronic messages? Are you an e-mail pack rat, or do you ruthlessly delete all but the most crucial communications? If you have any e-mail management tips or techniques you'd like to share with the rest of us, we're all ears!
RSS Feeds and E-Mail: Both Require Organization!
RSS feeds and e-mail accounts--with their many, many blog posts and e-mail messages--are formidable opponents. Yet, my plan is to vanquish both through organization! I fully intend to tame the RSS feed and e-mail monsters one way or another! How about you?
Eager for your input,
Jeanne
Did you enjoy this post? Learn anything? Have any tips to share? Please feel free to comment!
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Comment by Lillie Ammann
I explained how I manage my e-mail in a recent post.
The last paragraph is the one that applies to this discussion.
Comment by Jeanne Dininni
Writer's Notes
Thanks so much for sharing that post with us! I'll definitely check it out--and I hope my readers will, too!
Thanks again for your input!
Jeanne
Comment by Anonymous
Sometimes I can't remember where I filed an e-mail (was something "affiliate marketing" or was it under "article marketing"?), so I just do a search for the subject or the sender's name.
Using the search on g-mail makes things so much easier and makes me more confident in archiving things.
Comment by Jeanne Dininni
Writer's Notes
I totally agree. G-mail's search capability is great for finding specific e-mails. I used search before I began labelling my e-mails and found it really helpful for locating e-mails among the many I had in both my inbox and my archives. And, as you say, if you should forget exactly which label you've used for a particular e-mail, search will save the day every time!
Thanks so much for the visit--and the comment!
Jeanne