Switched to Apple / Mac

Peanut Shells

July 30th, 2008

Dave Teare has been touting Merlin Mann’s Zero Inbox philosophy for quite some time now and while I have always agreed with him in theory I’ve never quite been able to take the full plunge. However, a recent post over on 43folders clued me into my reluctance. I have mail dating back to 1998. I used Outlook2Mac to transfer all by mail from Windows when I switched to Mac and I am just generally bad about throwing mail away. The idea of not being to find that 10 year old message just eats me up. So I did like a lot people do and created over 65 folders and filed my messages away as neatly as possible. Being that I was a former Lotus cc:Mail user in the corporate world I have been used to the idea of mail rules for a long time too. Over the last couple of years I created 50 or more of those to help me automatically file tons of messages into all those folders too. Of course this brings me back to the zero inbox issue. Since I could not bear to simply delete the mail and insisted on the folder filing it was difficult to keep an empty inbox when I was just making a quick mail run but did not want to spend the time to do the organization. So of course, I left them in the ever growing inbox.

Until a few minutes ago…Enter the Peanut Shells folder

I created this folder, selected all the others, pressed Command-A to select all the messages, and dragged them to Peanut Shells. I then deleted all the empty folders. In a nutshell, Merlin’s statement:

Never organize what you can simply discard; and if you can’t discard it, throw it onto one big pile.

helped liberate me from my madness. Its so simple it is scary. I can create smart mailboxes at will, search any time, and generally have Apple Mail do all the work freeing me from all the organization tasks. Plus I have one big pile I can throw all the messages I cannot bring myself to delete onto. With the peanut shells pile all setup, I proceeded to triage my inbox like a man with a cause. Surprising it took less than 10 minutes with most hitting the shell pile. End result:

Inbox Zero!

Entry Filed under: General, Macintosh