Email! I just love email … no, I don’t. I hate email. Especially because there’s so darned much of it. Most of us are pretty fed up with it, but we can’t stop sending it. On the receiving end, we get a hundred emails a day, which range from useless to incredibly important.
You want to handle the urgent emails before the others, but they’re all mashed in together, like a glorious Hungarian goulash (which I hear is pretty darned glorious). One solution is to do what the most powerful people all do: create a high priority inbox on your own private email server in your basement and make sure all the other powerful people have that special email address.
But then you’ll discover, to your horror, that powerful people also want to send you funny jokes, top–10 lists, and their personal endorsement for “this great new body part enhancement formula that really works!” And even with a legitimate conversation, you won’t always know it’s high priority when it starts. A conversation might become important halfway through. Or unimportant halfway through. Or people might send important stuff to your low priority inbox. It’s a mess and for perhaps the first time in all of human history, there’s no app you can download to solve the problem! (Did you catch the irony there? I was trying to be subtle.)
It would seem the only solution is to return to the world of mind-numbing drudgery, and categorize inboxes message by message, since the separate-email-addresses trick isn’t working. But we’re smarter than that! As Masters of Our Universe, we have other tools at hand. We can tag our email bodies for a sorting system as flexible as it is powerful.
Use tags to sort by priority
Putting tags in the email body lets you auto-sort between high and low priority inboxes. It does the same work as email-address-based sorting, but no extra addresses to manage! No risk of anyone getting ahold of your high priority email address—not the paparazzi, not Vladimir Putin, no one.
A tag is a sequence of characters you sneakily add to your email signature. A tag is short, discreet, and unique, like some of the people I’ve dated. So what would you use for a tag that means “high priority?” To you and me, the answer is obvious: zplf.
With your tag chosen, you next set up a folder in your email called “High priority inbox.” Then you create a rule in your email program so any time a message contains ZPLF it gets moved to that folder. If you use webmail like Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, or FastMail, you can make the sorting happen by setting up a rule directly in the service. If you read your program through a program like Outlook or Apple Mail, most email reading programs also let you set up rules to move a message to a folder once it’s fetched from the server.
When your unsuspecting conversational partner replies to your message, they almost always include previous messages in the thread. Well, that previous message contains your high-priority code. So once you put the code into an email conversation, replies to that message will also go into your high priority inbox. Sneaky, eh?
Use disappearing ink
Say you’re corresponding with your secret overseas contact, arranging for an office visit next week where they’ll deliver “the papers.” Instead of using a special email address for the conversation, use a tag in the email body to shunt the conversation into your top secret inbox. But you’ll have to be careful. A big bold ZPLF tag will stick out in the middle of your courteous welcome letter. Your contact will figure out your scheme and start putting ZPLF in the cat picture messages they send you, because they truly believe the new Grumpy Cat meme belongs in your high priority inbox.
Even their unsuspecting replies will have the code, and get sorted into high priority.
Well, if they can play Spy versus Spy, so can you. Use tags written in invisible ink! Put your code quietly below your signature, and use your email editor to color the text white. Since it’s white text against a white background, it will be as invisible as Uma Thurman riding a polar bear through a snowstorm. But your sorting rule is colorblind, and it will still move the ZPLF message into your high-priority inbox. Your well-meaning-but-grumpy associate won’t have a clue they’re being sorted and selected.
Add or drop tags to change priorities
Except if they drift off topic, they might drop from “important” back down to “really? Do I need to waste my precious life energy on this?” Most emails include text from previous replies, so future messages in a thread you’ve tagged will still contain your code, trigger your rule, and sort into high priority. That was the whole point. But now that your colleague has started sending you memes, you want to demote the conversation back down to normal.
Easily done! Create a tag JMQM that means “leave this message alone.” Change your inbox sorting rule so it only moves messages that do contain ZPLF, but don’t contain JMQM. Voila! You can now promote and demote a conversation at will!
You can, of course, also add your ZPLF tag in the middle of a conversation, at the moment it leaps out to you as important. Then what was a normal conversation starts getting sorted as a high-priority conversation.
Email-address-based sorting doesn’t handle this sort of changing midstream, so your new, brilliant email body win out! But wait, there’s more! Email body tags have more tricks up their sleeves than a magician in the Red Light District.
Tags let you do even sneakier things
You can use tags to do more than just sort by priority. Tagging by topic can be particularly helpful. If, like me, you’re a Renaissance person, you can use topic tags that sort sculpture from poetry from playwriting. Or you can tag a message as involving all three! Using tags, you can easily release your inner polymath! (A polymath is a master of many disciplines! This is different from polyamorous, though depending on the circumstances, “master” and “discipline” might still apply.)
Speaking of multi-party partnerships, email tags enable a trick that can help those run smoothly. Imagine you’re emailing a client back and forth about the design of a website. You want your designer in on the content of these emails, so they know the client’s opinion of the site. You also want your client to speak freely’ so you’d like the thread to seem to be between just them and you (no designer on the TO: line). Rather than forwarding everything to the designer by hand, you can tag them in the email body, and set up a rule based on that to pass them each message in the exchange. This essentially includes a BCC in an email thread, where both your messages and your client’s messages get BCC’d, through the clever use of a tag.
Sorting email is a pain. Use tags to make your email program do it for you. Make your tags invisible to keep your contacts from coopting them. Add or drop tags if a thread changes priority. And step up your email game with special tags for special tricks. Leave those extra addresses for the secret basement servers—the key to mastering your inbox was in the email body all along.
I'm Stever Robbins. I run programs to help people have Extraordinary Lives and extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com .
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
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