10 days with flow–e
Writing about web page https://flow-e.com?code=YW9zZ2FvQGxpdmUud2Fyd2ljay5hYy51aw
Full disclosure: If my review below convinces you to give flow-e a go yourself, I get some extra free time with it.
For about 6 years I have used a ‘search first’ approach with my email, and aimed to get my inbox down to zero by archiving anything that has been done or is for reference only. This has on the large part been successful. I would suspect that I spend less time ‘searching’ for emails than I would in working with a folder structure for my emails.
What hasn’t been so successful for me, is managing the emails that are active in my email inbox. It’s been a point of frustration for a LONG time, and though I have had a notion in my mind of what I would want to try, I have never felt like anyone else sees it like I do:
- I don’t feel I can use my inbox as my task list because not everything I do originates in an email; I’ve never really taken to the Outlook tasks features; and mirroring email into 3rd party task management – yuk. I’ve had a bit of a hot and cold relationship with Asana over the years too… it’s currently only helping me pack for my holiday next week.
- Subject lines are just too often done badly. I have my own taxonomy of thinking, and they rarely coincide with what someone else has decided to call something. So, I also would like to add my own labels to an email or group of emails. Categories in Outlook are too clunky IMO.
- Grouping by email threads for is sometimes helpful to declutter my inbox, but there are usually one or two useful emails in a chain of 10, and its very hard sometimes to pick out the right ones, unless it was the one with the attachment - it is a fairly blunt tool.
- I order my inbox by date, newest at the top, and grouped. I’d rather have them listed in order of priority, as I would a task list, of which I’m going to do first. Outlook flags can’t do that.
So, enter Flow-e. My attention was caught by the Kanban board pattern that I’ve found useful in projects, but when I loaded my inbox with it (which was a cinch), I could near immediately get to work on bringing my inbox into shape.
Do you ever have that experience where you feel a product understands you? That’s Flow-e for me. It’s not perfect, for sure, but it makes so much more sense to my head than a standard Outlook interface. It's provided a pretty good solution to all of the email gripes and wishes I posted about above, and I’m hooked.