How to automate my email with filters, tags and folders in 2018

October 4, 2018 8:06 PM

(Especially) if you work in academia, have you got a good system for sorting, filtering and filing emails? Do you keep your inbox empty and stress free? Are you confident you aren't missing important emails in the flood of not-quite-so-important ones? Tell me about your filters and automation system! I use gmail, but I am open to changing if another program will offer better solutions.

On average I get just over 100 emails a day to my work (academic) account that are not general mailing list emails or spam. I.e. 100 that I potentially might need to read and respond to. I got this number by averaging across all days of the week, so it's higher on weekdays and low on the weekends.

(There's about 30 more to my personal email address as well, but it's the work ones that I'm finding overwhelming.)

I need better email filters so I can keep on top of this. I already filter everything that is only CCed to me into a separate folder that I only look at once every couple of days, and I filter mailing list emails including "all staff" emails into a separate folder which I barely ever look at.

What I'm looking for is ideas from other people, particularly other academics, for how they filter and sort their emails and what they find especially effective here. I know that the exact filters will differ from person to person, but even suggestions for how to go about figuring out what filters are good would help.

I do try to tag (some) things, and I do try to keep my inbox empty of everything except stuff I still need to follow up on (which right now is 78 things, which might be contributing to my sense of overwhelm). I use "snooze" on emails I need to follow up on but can't right now (e.g. they need info I currently don't have, or I'm waiting for someone else to get back to me before I can follow up.) I feel like the snooze function is actually making things worse though.

I also have notifications turned off most of the time, and try to only go in to check my email at certain times of the day (lunchtime, and late afternoon), but lately it tends to happen that while I'm dealing with them at lunchtime, new ones are coming in faster than I can make headway, and sometimes I just lose the rest of the day to digging myself out of the inbox.

If I go on leave for a week and don't keep up with email, that means I come back to around 800 unread emails, and I just can't get through the backlog while also staying on top of all the new ones that come in. I know people who put on their auto-reply that they will delete all mails on returning and please resend if it's important, and I'm starting to think I need to do this too, but there are plenty of really important emails that are not going to get resent and that I will miss this way (e.g. notifications of publication or conference acceptances/rejections/reviews, deadlines, EOI processes, emails about dates of meetings I am supposed to be at, changes to policy or procedure that I'm going to get into trouble for doing wrong if I don't know about it, things relating to student grades etc.)

posted by lollusc to Technology (11 answers total)

First, read this: Solving my email problem and realize that email is letting others put things on your to do list. Sometimes that is okay, but not always.

I am not an academic but I recently took a short course in email handling. For me, the most helpful tip was that your archives don't really need tags or folders because search is good enough now. Put it all in one folder, or since you are using gmail, just archive it. The second was to move the stuff you have to do to an Action tag (or folder) and the stuff you are waiting on others to Waiting. I made a third, an Action Later folder for things I'd like to do someday but are not Urgent.
The course also talked about declaring bankruptcy and starting over, which is just archiving everything in your inbox and leaving it for another time (possibly never). Since you have Action items in there, I'd move those out and then start fresh. Also, 78 action items is too many. If any are appointments, move them to your calendar. Now review them and cull the ones you can. Move some to Later. Do the quick ones. Don't let that number get above about 25.
posted by soelo at 8:31 PM on October 4, 2018 [4 favorites]

Response by poster: Gmail search seems to have gotten a lot worse lately. Lots of false positives. And results are whole conversation threads sometimes including 30 emails instead of a single mail. I can rarely find what I need by searching.
posted by lollusc at 8:35 PM on October 4, 2018 [3 favorites]

I have the same basic filter structure as you (important, deal with, trash)but I also filter new emails into a bunch of other filter categories so that going through my email isn’t nonstop context switching. I also have a “delete without reading” folder in addition to “look at quickly before deleting” folder.
posted by bleep at 9:16 PM on October 4, 2018

I don't use "snooze", instead I use Boomerang. Boomerang lets me specify conditions under which emails return; it also lets me send emails at odd hours but have them not arrive to my colleagues until the next morning/workday.

The real issue though is the number of emails you are receiving that require action. Is there anyone you can delegate some of these emails to? (other authors on some papers, a student, a TA for your class, etc)? Sometimes when you feel like you are drowning it is because you are trying to do too much yourself and not letting those you supervise grow into their roles. The nature of this of course depends on what your role is as an academic-- it may be that someone else has delegated too much to you, in which case you might be better off telling them so.
posted by nat at 9:23 PM on October 4, 2018 [2 favorites]

My main answer : I have one filter that sends letter of recommendation requests straight to a folder. Since those come in largeish sets of multiples per student and are rarely due immediately, this works out well. That folder pops up the list and gets bolded only when it gets new mail, so keeps my inbox clear(er) without manual sorting.

I tend to teach classes that are smaller and more manageable, but you can insist that when students email you they include the course number in the subject line, and that is a basis for another filter.

I can imagine setting something up like (from or including committee chair /people) for committee stuff.
posted by Dashy at 10:24 PM on October 4, 2018

I am a lecturer (just focused on teaching, not research), so I don't have the volume or variation in academic emails that you do. I do have one big tip though -- I teach very large classes and find that student questions are extremely repetitive (i.e. many people have the same questions), so I no longer use email for student questions. Instead I set up a Piazza* site and direct them there. My Piazza settings are set to email me at most a few times per day, and I deal with the student questions there. Bonus: often the students will help each other before I get there. My GSIs also spend a little time answering questions, which lightens my load.

I also set all my mailing lists to send me daily digests, not real time updates. And to be honest, I filter all emails from the chancellor and vice chancellors and random campus admin people straight to the trash. Anything actually relevant to me will be resent by my department. I try to keep my inbox to under 5-10 emails

*There are many choices for class discussion boards. I use Piazza mainly because of its convenient LaTeX support for math. I also like the fact that you can allow students to post anonymously, so they can ask questions they are embarrassed to ask in front of each other. (I can always see who it is, but identities can be hidden from other students.)
posted by ktkt at 10:48 PM on October 4, 2018 [1 favorite]

Way back in my first week of grad school my thesis advisor set me up a filter that forwards only emails that have my account in the TO field to my personal account. I’ve cautiously added a few more very targeted lists and senders whose messages get prioritized in the same way, and only those reach my phone - everything else remains in the institutional account, which I check 1-3 times a week. At a more senior level that’s still maybe not enough, but I’ve gotten a lot of mileage out of what’s essentially a white listing approach.
posted by deludingmyself at 11:44 PM on October 4, 2018

Re your follow up comment about searching gmail - when conversations come up as search results, only the relevant messages are expanded, so you can ignore the rest. Also, really digging into the advanced search features will save you so much time. You can use the little drop down arrow inside the right of the search box, but even more is available by typing search operators directly (they autofill to make it easier). For example
from:me to:joe filename:pdf syllabus
Will find emails you sent to Joe with a pdf attachment with the word syllabus somewhere in the email.
I second foregoing the folder organization 95% of the time for this reason.
posted by beyond_pink at 12:41 AM on October 5, 2018

In my syllabi I tell students that they must use the class designation e.g, WRIT ###: topic in the subject line or I will not read it. This allows for class specific items to be routed into folders or be flagged;

In the LMS, I set up messaging and mail to be routed to my mail to be auto sorted otherwise, I have a summary digest emailed to me of activity in the online course sections. These emails have the course designation as part of subject line;

For research, my university library was able to do RSS feed/email summary of journal publications of interest which get auto filtered to update tab in Gmail or auto filed in a folder in exchange;

Emails that become some action item get immediately added to calendar and the filed under READ;

Emails with doc attachments like for a meeting get added to calendar with their related files then popped to READ;

Email is viewed in conversation mode and dealt with as a group for potential action, filing or deletion;

To get to inbox zero, everything is either added to calendar; dealt with within ten minutes then put in READ or deleted. The only exception is email that is course related which I keep the whole semester then archive.

My dean is ruthless in processing his email, and only has READ and SENT folders. It helps that he has a sharp memory to juggle alot of detail. He also does a bare skim on stuff he was cc'd on to understand developing contexts then files immediately to READ. Another thing he does is read the latest email in a conversation threads to see if he needed to action item or just file since things were resolved or negotiated already.
posted by jadepearl at 4:57 AM on October 5, 2018 [1 favorite]

Echoing the request to have students put their class name in the subject of the emails.

I use Sanebox and it helps a bit.

With Gmail search, I don't use any folders anymore.
posted by k8t at 8:42 AM on October 5, 2018

Librarian, not an academic, but some similar issues. I use Gmail both for personal use (more email) and work (need to be able to find things again in a big way.)

1) Use filters extensively.
I filter things like mailing lists (need to skim them, but they're not urgent) into their own folder. (At home, I have folders for news updates, email receipts, newsletters, etc. all grouped under a larger label. I can collapse it if I need to focus, or expand it if I want to check unread messages.)

Besides getting them out of my inbox, I've found the batch processing of going through them by category really speeds things up for me - I'm not constantly jumping between "Oh, that's an email list, this is a reference question, that is an invoice..."

2) Label things as I go through the first time.
I have a bunch of emails I need to be able to find, but don't need a reply (like an invoice, where I need it when I do our purchase card thing at the beginning of the month). These get labelled and removed from the inbox promptly. Getting comfy with the keyboard commands help a lot.

Otherwise, once I process something, it gets labelled and gets removed from the inbox. If it's going to take me more than a minute or two to answer, it gets a task in my todo app (I use Todoist, which integrates with Gmail nicely, and you can click from the link in Todoist to get back to the email as long as you're logged into the right account. This is amazing for 'I need to do something about this next week/in three months' type stuff.)

I have some general labels (reference questions to put in our stats and label more precisely, invoices, etc.) and then also create them for specific projects, basically anything that's likely to have more than a dozen or so threads over a couple of weeks.

3) Set up a search for 'needs label'
At work, I found I was missing emails that started with me sending something - so I set up a filter that creates a label of 'needs label'. (And search wasn't always helpful, since a lot of the more likely search terms turn up in a lot of my emails...) So now I go through every couple of days and relabel those, and then I can find them again in their proper labels.

The filter is
from:([e-mail]) -in:chats

(That's because otherwise I was getting every chat in there.)
posted by jenettsilver at 9:49 AM on October 5, 2018