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Ask HN: How do you organize Gmail as a dev?

by fruktmix on 11/8/24, 10:08 AM with 4 comments

I am just curious how people are organizing their emails and keeping everything sorted.

Saw this tutorial on organizing into Follow-Up, Awaiting Response and To Read Labels. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oLdHnWLbn4A

How do you guys keep everything sorted and what's your typically workflow?

  • by solardev on 11/8/24, 10:41 AM

    For my personal email, I don't organize anything. It all goes into the primary inbox and I just snooze messages over and over until I feel like dealing with it, eventually. After 2 or 3 snoozes I'll usually either finish it or archive and forget about it. The really important things get starred... and then snoozed anyway.

    Once every few weeks, I'll mass archive everything left over in the inbox (that's not starred or snoozed). Meaning they just disappear into the cloud and never get dealt with. I figure if it's important enough they'll email me again anyway...

    This means that by the end of an average day, I have between 0 and 5 massages left in the inbox. It keeps the daily responsibilities manageable.

    Has worked well for the last decade or so. Good enough for me.

  • by JohnFen on 11/8/24, 3:35 PM

    I don't use gmail, but with email generally, I don't organize it at all. I tend to keep everything in the inbox. I mostly reply to important emails immediately to get them off my plate. Important stuff that I need to attend to later gets added to my separate todo list.

    I used to follow a more detailed organizational process with email, but I found that doing that took more time and effort than it was worth.

  • by Terr_ on 11/8/24, 10:19 AM

    Alas, I currently don't do much: The majority of things are either in the ticketing system, slack messages, or appear as calendar events.

    The most I do is have some filters to slap labels on things and "archive" items I don't want showing in the overall inbox.

  • by bjourne on 11/8/24, 11:34 AM

    I use IMAP folders: personal/work, personal/invoices, software/python, software/emacs, etc.