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Hi, Skotch here. I manage the Yahoo! Mail Front End team. Front End is what you see. Back End deals with how we actually get and store your mail, and it happens in a cave.

Back in the 90s I decided I was going to get organized. I thought a to-do list would be enough, but then my boss made me take a time management course.

It was held on a Saturday. Superb. But to tell the truth it really did change my life to get fully organized. I learned to use a massive day-planner that I lugged around, and then later moved everything to my palmtop computer.

But for the last two years, I’ve been living completely out of Yahoo! Mail. I use it for anything I need to track. I’m always near a computer that has an Internet connection, so this works pretty well for me. Here are five ways I use my mail account to track the flow of my life:

- Tabbing messages I need to respond to
- Marking messages as unread
- Creating a “Follow Up” folder and dragging from tabs
- Using the Drafts folder as to-do list
- Search: everything in my account is a keyword away

Tabbing messages I need to respond to
My first rule is to not reply to anything until I’ve read everything that’s new, because it can be embarrassing to reply to Ethan “I’m getting on that bug” and then open a message from Larry saying he already fixed the bug last week. So if a message needs a response, I pop it up into its own tab by double-clicking on the message in the list. That way when I’m done reading my messages, I can just look at all my tabs to figure out what I need to reply to. Then I respond to them one by one.

Marking messages as unread
Sometimes I can’t get to a message right away, so my second rule is to mark a message as unread so that I’m forced to read it again later and deal with it (easy to do, by right clicking on the message in the list. Also, in the next version of Mail you get a few seconds to give messages a quick once-over and leave them marked as unread if you want to come back to them later). If I don’t deal with a message and it stays marked as read, then I’ll never remember to go back and look at it. I use the unread trick in my personal folders, too, so that the folder turns bold and demands that I deal with it. I prefer the impossible-to-ignore unread messages count to using flags, but that’s just me.

Creating a “Follow Up” folder and dragging from tabs
My third rule is to move messages I can’t get to right away into my “Follow Up” folder, which I created by clicking “Add” next to “My Folders”. It’s easy to drag a message from the list into a folder, and I can also drag and drop messages right from their little tabs into a folder (bet you didn’t know that one!). After I deal with a message in the “Follow Up” folder, I drag it back into my Inbox so that I always have a record of it.

Using the Drafts folder as to-do list
My fourth rule is to use my Drafts folder as a to-do list. When I need a reminder to get something done, I just create a draft message with my to-do item, but I never send the message or even address it – it’s simply a note to myself. From “Drafts” I can just drag my message into my “Follow Up” folder. Since I started doing this, I find that I don’t need to use sticky notes. I can create drafts with rich-text features like bullet points to track any info that I want, such as directions to my favorite camping site, and I can drag them into any folder (like “Directions”).

Search: everything in my account is a keyword away
Since mail has a killer search capability, which will just get better over time, I’m happy keeping all my info in one place so I always know where to look.

I could go on, but are you ready for those kind of thrills? :D

Go ahead – try some of these techniques out. They’re easy, they’re built into the system, and they work great for me.

Cheers,
Skotch + The Yahoo! Mail Beta team

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Ever wonder how we decide what features to build? How Yahoo! Mail Beta should work and look? It’s democratic: we ask our users.

Here in the User Experience & Design department, we constantly study how people work with email and what they want and need. We invite them to our Design Research Labs on a regular basis and let them tinker with the latest features and enhancements we’re developing.

What happens? We get reactions ranging all the way from confusion (wait…what?) to elation (Yes!). And often, we get concrete insights.

For example, we removed the familiar browser buttons (Forward, Back, etc.) and address bar (http://www…) in an early version of this Beta. We thought: strip that stuff out. Make it feel more like a desktop application, and less like a web page. But what did we find? In usability studies, people felt abandoned, lost. “Where are my browser controls?” they asked. So we returned the buttons to their appointed place on the page. Ahhhh.

It’s uninhibited feedback like this that helps us make Yahoo! Mail more useful and easier to manage.

You can play a pivotal part in how Yahoo! Mail and other Yahoo! properties are designed. Interested? Sign up here.

With interest in how you do things, we are

The Yahoo! Mail User Experience & Design Team

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