Messaging apps

• 19 January 2023
• digital living

• Email*

  • So something that I do that I know is fairly bad practice, but works just because of my specific situation, is forward my personal emails to my work email. I tag them as they come in so it’s clear where it’s from. I really dislike how much my work and private life are separated. That is NOT to say that I wish I took work home with me, what it means to say is that I am still me, the same person. The idea that almost all functions in my life are doubled, so that I can make someone else money, is just conceptually frustrating to me. A second email, calendar, storage space, password manager, etc, etc, etcetera. I do understand it though, and would not recommend this to people even though I do it, and can very much articulate my own reasoning.

  • Something that I didn’t do for a long time, and made a huge difference once I did was manage my subscriptions! So much spam. My process is typically, scroll to the bottom of the email and look for unsubscribe, if it’s not there mark spam, if it is I’ll check it out. If the unsubscribe has reasonable options, I’ll use that, or a box that completely unsubscribes if I need that. If it doesn’t have these, I mark it as spam, as opposed to going through 45 boxes and manually unchecking each one. That’s spammy.

  • Getting rid of tabs in gmail so you only have the inbox, this goes hand in hand with just marking things as spam or unsubscribing.

  • I love my folder structure. I am, and easily, stay at inbox zero, and fully believe that’s why. Every email that comes in, if I don’t respond right there, goes into one of those folders. I don’t go to bed without completing my today folder! Even if that means just putting all the emails into the “tomorrow” folder haha. The only thing that kinda sorta sucks (but not really once you’re used to it) is having to move your emails from tomorrow to today daily.

  • Folders

    • 1. Today
    • 2. Tomorrow
    • 3. Monday
    • 4. Waiting (This folder is used if I am explicitly waiting for a reply)
    • 5. Watching (These are for email threads I’m just waiting, but not participating in)
    • 6. Tasked (If there’s email communication for something I need to do, I’ll put the task in my task manager and then put the email in this folder)
    • FWD Emails
      • Email 1
      • Email 2
      • etc
• Signal*
  • This is less of a true all in one solution kind of thing now that they don’t support SMS, but a great option if you and your friends are looking to switch to a more secure messaging service.
• Slack*
  • I notice a lot of organization use this for communications, so if you volunteer, you'll want Slack open a lot more.
• Messages
• Snapchat
• Discord

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