A follow up to my earlier note about tags and Microsoft Outlook: I am happy to say that Taglocity has changed my life. I used to have folders in folders in folders and dealing with any received mail was torture. Now I’ve implemented tags and my workflow has totally changed.
I used to deal only with my unread mail, which was nice but it meant crud built up in my inbox. I used to flag mail messages as To Dos, but half the time I never got to reviewing the To Do list. Now I tag each mail message as it comes in (unless Taglocity can tag it for me), take whatever action is necessary on it, and move it to one archive folder. If I need to see a collection of messages about a particular subject, I use Taglocity’s filters or have it create a search folder for me.
My morning routine is a lot simpler too. I come in in the morning and the only things in my inbox are the ones that have come in since the night before. I delete most of the bacn, tag anything that I responded to the prior evening through Outlook Web Access (which doesn’t support tags), archive all tagged messages, and start processing all the new stuff.
The best part: that empty inbox. Now I work from my action list like I should have been doing all along. Inbox Zero is a good thing.
Some specific notes on Taglocity: using the Tag Cloud and other parts of the UI to assign tags and filters is a little challenging, since I tend to have a lot of tags. As in my tag collection in iPhoto, I find typing the tag name to be much, much easier. But having a Tag Cloud for my email is kind of cool anyway.