Further exploration in Gmail

But first, a picture of the great blue heron that was stalking my fish this morning:

Yesterday I discovered the color-coding of labels in Gmail.  Despite having somewhere in the neighborhood of... fifteen active email accounts, I've started routing the bulk of what I get through one Gmail account.  I liked being able to have a spam account that I used for signing up for reward programs, but I haven't gotten around to syncing Outlook onto my laptop, which means I don't have easy access to half my accounts during the day.  (I guess I could set up the Gmails to all forward to each other?  Hm...)

Anywho, I color-coded all my labels yesterday - ILL-related mailing lists are one color, other library lists are another color, family is red, and so forth.  I briefly experimented with nesting the labels, realized it didn't give me label counts in bulk or let me view multiple sub-sets of labels concatenated, so I undid all of the nesting and just went with the color-coding.  The nested labels had the paths, which actually made them harder to read.

Perhaps I think too much about organizing information flow.  My email storage on my work account is relatively low (about 30 MB), so I end  up archiving it to the hard drive fairly often.  My archive structure has changed at least four times; it's currently broken down by month with four or five subset folders in each month.  I've gone back and forth at times about Outlook's rules: do I see important things faster when I'm putting them in their own folder, or when I let them hit the inbox and have to manually sort them for later reference?

On some level, organization of everything occupies a lot of my thought:  space, spices, cabinets (food and dishes), the refrigerator, paper files, computer files, books, clothes, plants in the garden.  You can see on my story list when I first started keeping my written-by-hand stories in a file box: about March 1998, because the story numbers and file numbers start to align (with a one-off anomaly cause by moving something later).

The end goal of organizational schemes, of course, is being able to find something.  That's what the labels or folders in the email structure let me do.  Color coding the labels don't help with finding things later, though - it helps with initial response prioritization.  If something comes in with a red label, I know it's one of the family labels, and I'll probably look at it before something that comes in with orange (all the merchants).  In a way, the color is acting as a folder, and the labels become sub-folders.  What I still can't do is look at the overarching folder all together.  I would have to apply a generic label to multiple label groups, and I really don't like doubling up labels.

For what I do with my email, this is probably good enough.  We'll see if I change my mind in six months like I tend to do with my email archives structure.

(Crap... I went to put tags on this, and... I don't have an 'information science' tag; I have a 'library science' tag.  Stupid classification schemes...)