White’s of Henry Lane

Brendon at the Slacker Manager has very kindly linked up my GMail Journal post. (As has Lifehacker. Its exciting when your writing grows legs.)

Apparently Exchange doesn’t play nice with appending “+whatever” to your username. If you’re on an Exchange server, you could borrow a method I’ve used at a few of my employers to simplify auto-sorting mail. We prepend the subjects of messages with the docket number of the project to which the mail refers. So if you want to tell me about new documents for a project with the docket AAA 001, your mail would have the subject “[AAA001] New documentation on server”. I would have a rule that automagically sorts that to my AAA001 folder, and depending on the urgency of the project either removes the unread flag, or notifies me your message arrived.

You could set up your journal in Outlook by replacing that docket number with your journal categories. You could even use a tool like AutoHotKeys to create shortcuts that are expanded for you if you got sick of typing the journal entry categories.

I don’t know enough about advanced Outlook to come up with anything more sophisticated than this, but sometimes there’s beauty in simplicity.

Incidentally, if your company hasn’t picked up on something like the docket number tags, and you communicate primarily by email, do everyone a favour and get this system in place.