My Newly Discovered Secret for Increased Email Productivity

Earlier in the week, I added Pine support to my VMWare-based Ubuntu email server. That email server is now sitting on my Ubuntu *workstation* at home in the VMWare environment. As such, I now connect to it remotely.

So, I added Pine to the mix for a couple of reasons: low bandwidth, nostalgia for when it was my only real option for reading email, and for its potential as a really powerful email productivity enhancer.

However, I had been looking more at the filtering and tagging capabilities as the source of the productivity, only to find a secret that I probably knew all along, but never was willing to admit to being true.

See, Pine doesn't have a preview pane. You see a list of message subjects, senders, dates and statuses. To read a message, you have to make a deliberate decision that an email is worth reading.

That tiny little speedbump has been the key to seriously increased speed in going through my inbox. I, like lots of other digitally connected folks, am subscribed to quite a few discussion lists. I *dramatically* prefer them to online forums (that's a post for another day) and they're often the best source of support for software or other niche topics.

However, when I've got a preview pane in your email client and every message opens, even if just for a split second, before you delete it, I tend to get sucked into reading it.

On Pine (and I've since verified that my instinct is the same on other email clients under similar conditions), because there's no preview pane, I delete those threads that I'm not interested in. When it's there, I read them and *then* delete.

When I'm in the "subject-only" mode, I find myself going to the email client out of that habit that we all sort of develop. However, there's nothing new there and I'm actually dealing with the *important* ones instead of just the new ones, which is a shift I can feel in my gut.