elegant chaos

I like this post by Matt Gemmell on how to manage your email.

He describes pretty much what I’ve been doing for the last few years.

I’m not as good as I should be about replying quickly to the people who do matter, but I’m considerably better than I used to be since I started being more ruthless about the others.

The only thing I’d add to Matt’s suggestions is to do the following:

• make a group in Address Book / Contacts
• add the important people to it
• make a new Smart Mailbox that just shows mail from people in this group
• change Mail’s badge to show the unread count from this mailbox
• change Mail’s notification sound to only fire for this mailbox
• reduce the frequency that it checks mail - does it really matter if you don’t get it for another half an hour?