Raised Eyebrow Blog

I’m the project manager at Raised Eyebrow so it’s part of my job to keep our projects organized. Organizing a team of people, multiple project schedules, budgets and clients probably seems like a daunting task. I’m hoping that through this blog, I’ll be able to share with you some of my organizational tricks but today I want to tell you about My Rainbow Inbox and how I love to colour code things.

Over the years I have developed my own formula for colour coding and I’ve found it especially helpful to colour code my inbox. My inbox is sort of like my communications command centre. I use Apple’s Mail program and I’ve installed a plugin called Mail Tags which allows me to add a project name and colour to each email message. (As an aside, Mail Tags also comes with a few extra features for people who follow the Getting Things Done approach, but I mainly use the project tags.)

My system is this:
- Larger projects are coded in the warm end of the colour wheel - reds, yellows and oranges;
- Smaller projects are cooler colours - blues, greens and purples;
- And everything related to Raised Eyebrow is pink, ofcourse.

I’ve also set up Mail filters to automatically colour code messages as I receive them, so if you work for Terrific Clients R Us and your email address is you@terrificclientsrus.com my email program will set all of the emails you send to me with your project name and colour. Easy peasy.

My other trick to inbox organization is keeping it under control. I like to keep my entire inbox viewable on one screen, and I don’t use the preview pane, so there’s no scrolling up or down. Once I’ve dealt with an email I delete it or file it into a project folder if I think it might be useful in the future. That’s not to say I don’t have to do a purge every now and then, but when I do it’s easy for me to sort my messages by projects/colours and quickly see which messages can stay and which ones should go.

What I like about colour coding is that at a glance I can see what the priorities are right away. Plus, it’s fun and makes my inbox look a little more interesting. It’s a fairly simple system but I’ve found that less complex organizational systems are often the most helpful and easiest to implement and use.

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This entry was written by Melanie Mena on Tuesday, September 2nd, 2008 at 12:01 pm, is filed under Productivity, and is tagged as Add new tag. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.