I have noticed that there are three approaches to using tags and labels in emails (and everywhere else actually), and in reality I have problems with all three. People either go all out and use a lot of tags, use no, or very few tags, or try to think of some
strategically placed tags.
My problem with going all out is that you get so many tags that it’s no longer really helpful, since you have to search your tags, which is very counter productive, since the essence of tags is to find your emails faster. I’m not saying that it’s slower than actually searching the emails, but there’s got to be a better way.
Using very few or no tags at all might be a good approach if you don’t get too much mail, but even then, at least coming up with one or two might help you in organization, and personally I don’t like just having a landslide of emails in one folder at all.
Strategically placing a few tags or labels has been the tactic I used so far, but the problem is that you will get email that doesn’t fit. I don’t like “Misc” and “Other” tags because they are not useful at all, so where do you place these emails? I’ve stopped tagging and labeling and I tried to come up with a different type of system.
Many people misuse tags and labels. For example, they use a label to mark all messages from “Daniel” for example. This is a flawed approach organization-wise, since all email systems have search functions and typing “from:Daniel”will list all emails from the person. This means that you are just duplicating information, why not use labels for something more meaningful?Important and To do tags may also be redundant, since you can star, or flag a message. I realize that you may use tags to mark importance and stars to mark something else, I’m just talking about general usage here. The point is that tags and labels should be used to add extra information, help you in productivity and organization.
Right now I use the approach of using as few labels as possible, enabling me to get at-a-glance info, but not letting the number of labels overwhelm me. The first step I take is to decide the state of an email or a conversation. I ask myself the following questions and take the actions beside them.
If the answer is no to all questions I generally delete the message. I know you have a lot of space on your hard drive and on Gmail, but why keep a message if it has no information, I don’t need to take action or answer it and it isn’t important at all. A big step in productivity is when you learn to delete things, it’s harder than it seems.
If I need to answer it later on, I just keep it in my inbox. I hate a cluttered inbox, so I will answer these pretty soon. This helps me keep a clear mind, and makes me much faster in reply time.
If I need to take action I star it (or flag in Outlook) and usually keep it in my inbox. I don’t have items that need to be done, but only next month. In this case, I would star it and create a tag named “Future to do”. You could also use Remember the Milk Gmail integration or the task manager in Outlook to keep a tab on these.
Information content is the only place where I actually use tagging. Therefore my labels and tags are based on information content, like “blog marketing”, “post questions” and so on. The advantage of this system is that I don’t really need a “misc” label. The reason is that if some information content deserves a label I will get many similar emails. If it is unique and I don’t assign a label, it’s not that important. Also, searching is easier, since emails in one content label, say in “blog marketing” may have very different content. So performing a search on “marketing” will probably only show me half the results I need, whereas the tag will contain all emails.
Original post here: Daniel
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