Managing your Electronic Datastream

“Too Much Information, Running Around My Brain” ~ The Police.  “This business will get out of control. It will get out of control and we’ll be lucky to live through it.” ~ Admiral Josh Painter.

Do you ever feel your daily intake of information can be summed up with these two 1980s pop iconoclastic quotes?  Sting laments about a continued brain freeze in the song Too Much Information while the naval fleet commander raises concerns about too many ships being in close proximity from the classic Tom Clancy’s military technology thriller The Hunt For Red October As much as I want to be connected in getting the latest information, news, and communications that I can possibly digest, not managing this effort would make things overwhelming.

Like most of you, I have constant data coming into my technical devices from various points of origin. Contributing to that process I at one point or another created accounts, actively participate in social media activities and spend time daily catching up on blogs and RSS feeds. This has lead to getting content that I want, but also as an unwanted by product increased the amount of unsolicited data that comes my way.  I try to manage as best I can, and most sources have good tools or tricks that allow me some measure of control.  But not all.

I’ve reached well over 100 friends on Facebook, and for me that is too many to keep up with. I still get requests to friend people, but at this point I no longer just blindly accept them. By using the very efficient and powerful Remove feature, I routinely block all of the game/app/cause updates that folks feel the need to share. Quite frankly, I could care less if you just earned so many points in this app, or gifted me a bottle of aftershave, or need someone to adopt a blue goat.  It’s clutter, and in the course of just a few minutes a week I permanently keep all of that from displaying in the news feed.

I am approaching upwards of 200 followers in Twitter, and as a raw feed that too is more than enough to manage and exchange tweets with.  Some of my favorite posters may post as many as 50 tweets in a day. Using Twitter Lists I create groups and have columns ordered in TweetDeck: Sports, Muse, Social Media, Dudes, etc.  What I get is control of the type of tweets and in a somewhat organized fashion.  I also keep up with LinkedIn by way of a column in Tweet Deck as well.

All of the above mentioned social media sites have functional applications I use on my iPhone.  The only drawback is they don’t necessarily synch the mobile versions and web versions. But speaking of synching and iPhone Apps, I love to organize certain aspects of my life and can do so with Zenbe Lists, Evernote and Calendar.  Each of these apps allows me to link with a server coresponding to my account so that I can access and retrieve data at any time.

But what I really struggle with is email.  I use Outlook to manage 5 email accounts and estimate that on average I am getting 75 emails a day; that doesn’t include items that are automatically routed to my Junk folder. Perhaps 25% of those are an email that I really want to see.  So what I am going to attempt to do today is play with the junk email and rules options to see if I can’t better manage this data stream run amok.

• I’m going to begin by highlighting a specific non-desired email in my Inbox and right click to display the option of Find All > Messages From Sender. Outlook by default searches through my Inbox, Junk folder and Personal Folders.
• Then I’ll highlight them all and right click to select Move To Folder > Junk mail.
• Next I’ll navigate to the Junk folder, highlight and right click one of those messages I just flagged as spam and select Junk E-mail Options > Add sender to Blocked Senders List.
• I’ll repeat these three steps for all of those nasty buggers

Now I am looking at emails that basically fall into three categories: Those from actual people I know, automated emails that I receive because I specified somewhere that I’d like to get these messages, and messages that I don’t know yet what to do with.

Similar to Blocked, there is also an option to flag an account or server as Safe. For the first two categories above I am going to repeat the same process as I did for blocking an email, but instead add it to the Safe Senders List. That now leaves the third category which at this point I’m not sure what to do.

• Of those Safe listed, I am also going to create some rules to help me manage them.  This required me to setup some folders for organizing mail. I created folders for generic on-line accounts, all on-line receipts, specific folders for popular email accounts, etc. If you haven’t done so, you may want to consider doing this now.
  • For the rules, I have decided to create a rule so that all important receipts are placed automatically in the on-line receipts folder.  I set this up using key words for the Sender field.
  • I took advantage of the Categorize feature and decided to add some color coding to certain types of emails. Topical news gets an orange tag. Social media posts and updates are blue. Money related is red.

Once satisfied, I’ll let this go for a week and see what happens.  What would be nice is sometime I’d like to research some Custom Actions for rules, where an email might be automatically added to the safe list if I catch something in junk mail that I want to keep.  Using Office 2007 on Windows 7 this might be pretty easy to research.

The next thing I want to research is how I can go about changing colors to the folders in Windows Explorer for Windows 7. Anyone tackled that yet?