Communication Segmentation with the iPhone

Sunday, August 24th, 2008

Everyday we’re getting slammed with information from every angle, so I’m always looking for better, more efficient ways to make sense of it all. Last week I found myself deleting dozens of email alerts and notifications from Facebook, Twitter, and various banks.  While this information is arguably important, I’ve decided that it’s clogging up my inbox and making me slower to respond to emails from friends and family.  I’ve devised a scheme to solve this problem.

Since I’m increasingly mobile, like a lot of people, I chose to use the iPhone as the centerpiece of my “Communication Segmentation” plan (note: term originally coined by Tad Johnson).  iPhone makes it extremely easy to add new Gmail accounts to your email application, so I decided to make multiple Gmail accounts – one for each of these communication types.  I registered all five accounts in one day, so it would appear that Google doesn’t care if you do this.

1. Personal Gmail: I get all my regular email here from friends and family.  I tend to filter out any kind of advertising, etc. and send those emails directly to the archives.

2. ActionsTalk Gmail: I have a few things routed here now.  Since I set up a Twitter account for ActionsTalk (my startup spotlight website), I’ve got all the alerts for that account going here.  Any new comment alert coming from the site (ActionsTalk.com), and emails from sponsors or startups are also sent here.  Lastly, I used search.twitter.com to set up an RSS feed for any time someone mentions “@ActionsTalk” on Twitter.  I pump that RSS feed through xFruits using their RSS to Email generator and voila… I get an email any time we’re mentioned.

3.  Twitter Gmail: I do all the same stuff with this email account that I did with #2, but this time I have all the alerts for my personal Twitter account fed in.

4.  Facebook Gmail: I’ve got all my alerts from Facebook here like new friend requests, notifications of wall posts, photo tags, etc.

5.  Finance Gmail: I now have all my email from any of my bank accounts sent to this email address.  This includes bill pay reminders, spending threshold alerts, etc.

Bottom line: This system took about 30 minutes to set up.  After about a week of using it, I can say that it has made me much better at reading and responding to emails.  I can clearly see how many of each type I have, and I can deal with them at my leisure. Give it a shot, and let me know what you think in the comments.

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  • Nice work.
  • Nice work.
  • nice read

    Thanks
    Fixan
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  • I posted your article to my myspace profile.

    Have a nice day
    Milli
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  • After about a week of using it, I can say that it has made me much better at reading and responding to emails
  • thanks. Never before I had crossed over like an informative post like this. I was totally sick with your post you shared .Awesome share dude
  • Tim Indra
    Pretty solid stuff Blake, but for me now that I'm retired I can afford be more inefficient :)
  • Jeremy Eskritt
    Great idea! I have this same communication segmentation problem, and this will be the perfect solution using my iphone.

    In regards to your to-do lists, why bother using another app or online to-do solution. If you have your iphone on you at all times, why not use the existing notes feature to put all of your to-do lists, shopping lists, etc? One less thing to take up time...just a suggestion. Few drawbacks include 1.) task due dates/priority 2.) there is no history of tasks completed. But rarely do i look back, wanting to know everything i've ever done on my to-do list.
  • Blake - Awesome post! This is the kind of personal how to that more bloggers should move towards. Lifehacker just says what to do without giving personal examples and other bloggers just tell without showing. Solid combo and phenom post. I want to do this...but I need an iPhone!
  • Hey Patrick. I've been using SimpleGTD.com for to-do lists for about a year now. I'll check out Toodledo, though. Thanks for the tip!
  • Update...I switched to Toodledo because it integrates well with the Todo iPhone app from Appigo. Let's see if it actually helps me GTD :-)
  • I like the idea, Blake. I tend to have a different e-mail box for each of my different "hats" that I wear - a personal box (where facebook/twitter/other messages come to), a Bucketworks box, a First Stage box, a box for my home business, and a DePaul box. Having separate inboxes tends to help me focus in on one particular aspect of my life when I'm trying to work on stuff - I don't look at my Bucketworks box when I'm trying to focus on First Stage stuff, for example.

    I'm also trying to use Toodledo (www.toodledo.com) as a centralized location for all to-do items. It's great because other users can assign me tasks, too.

    -p.
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