How is everyone collecting emails for different projects for reference? Do you use project labels within your email client or are you doing something different? I’m an Evernote user currently, but I’m looking to move away from it. Do you have any recommendations for software and workflows?
Thanks
Currently I have a folder for each project with some sub folders:
- My Subversion Check ins
- Other Subversion Check ins
- Documentation
- Cron Job Logs
This is quite specific to being a developer and our setup so I’ll break it down a bit.
Subversion (like Git) is version control. Ours emails us (everyone on the project) every time we check something in which helps keep the non programmers in the loop. I like to seperate the emails from myself and my colleagues just so I can see easily when I worked on something in my email. Documentation is anything I receive that could be considered documentation - sample files, specifications, etc. Cron Job logs are the results of scripts running regularly on our servers - emails get put in here automatically so in the morning I don’t start the day with 300 unread emails and can check each service one at a time.
Aside from documentation I set up rules for each folder to automate the filing. If I get something I need to keep but it’s not documentation it goes in the main project folder. Once a project is “complete”, I delete the subversion directories (and mails within them) and the rules associated with them. (All check in details are on the server anyway, but after completion the likelihood that I’ll have to forward a check in to someone and say “was completed on such and such a date” is much lower.)
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Thanks Rose. Maybe printing the emails to pdf and using a file structure is all I need. Perhaps I could automate the folder creation process when I create a new project / client and then have Hazel file the pdf copies of my email to those directories. What do you recommend to automate the directory structure on a Mac? Automator? I had a Workflow, workflow that did it when I was using Dropbox but I’m using OneDrive and I don’t believe it’s supported or ever has been without using an API. One issue I know I’ll face is adding folders to an existing client. When I tried to automate that with Workflow, I’d get an error because the parent folder already existed. Without knowing how to use an API, I’m not sure how I’d solve that.
Thanks
This is a very general question, and hard to give you a easy answer. As a PM, I never delete an email, so I set folders with years, depending on the project start date. And another folder for each project. I archive every email (sent or received) in that folder.
I use Outlook on Windows, which has a very powerful plugin called SimplyFile.
If the email is a specific approval that should be filled as a project artifact, then I turn it into PDF and file it in the project directory (which is shared with others)
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