Getting your email under control!

Imagine if you kept your physical mailbox as full as you keep your email box(es). Besides pissing off the mailman, you would have a terribly inefficient system, with too much information, lacking context, staring you in the face every day. Every time you logged on, you would see 5000 messages, maybe 50 new messages (though they’re not new, you saw them before, but didn’t feel like opening them). If you need one of them, you scroll and scroll, or search among the hundreds (thousands?) Until you find what you need. Look at the picture below…

Sexy…I know. Here’s how it works:

That’s the basic workflow. There is no need to keep things in your email. So how, you ask, do you get things into Evernote? Well allow me to present 3 ways.

  1. Brute force. Simply create a new note in EN, copy and paste the body of the email. Drag pictures and attachments. Etc. Whatever you need to do. Sometimes this is the easiest thing to do. An email may come in with a paragraph of gibberish, but all it says is “do this”. Just create a new note saying what to do. Done.
  2. Forward the message.  In Evernote, click the Account button at the top of the toolbar. In the bottom left, there is your Evernote email address. Add that to your contacts and send all mail messages there. They will arrive in your Inbox notebook. Tag it appropriately. Done
  3. The Advanced (Awesome) Method…(it deserves its own section). It costs $1.99 and only works on Macs.

Send-To-Evernote Guide

  1. Buy the app Growl from the app store. $1.99
  2. Download the application Quicksilver. Amazing app, will make many other things great as well.
  3. Open automator (it’s in your applications folder) and create an application
  4. Add the action “run applescript” to the workflow
  5. Add the script from this site. It helps to choose to open it in applescript, then copy and paste it from there to automator
  6. Save the automator application wherever you like, probably in the applications folder for easy access. Name it anything, like Mail2Evernote
  7. Back in quicksilver, go to the menu and access triggers
  8. Create a trigger for the application Mail2Evernote, with any shortcut (command+shift+E worked for me)

As long as Quicksilver is open, that command will take the selected mail message and lead to a pop-up asking for tags. I changed the quicksilver settings to open at login, not show in the dock, and only show in the menu bar.

Here is a video of all the other uses of Quicksilver…I did not make this.

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Posted in EN-GTD Theory

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