Daniel Pataki had an interesting post over at gHacks.net last week: separating your social (networking) life and your real life. Social networking sites send large volumes of e-mail to their users, and the weight of all these notifications in your inbox has great potential to ruin your productivity.
The Social Networking Time Sink
Social networking sites send out a lot of e-mail. What is a good way to prevent someone from forgetting about your site, product, or service? Send them an e-mail to reel them back in. It is a marketing technique that is as old as e-commerce itself.
Social networking sites use e-mail to alert members to new activity such as comments, friend requests, event invitations, and more. The problem is that most of the time these notifications are not very important, and tend to derail us from whatever we are doing at the moment. Most people who use one or more social networking sites (e.g. Facebook) can relate — do you remember the last time you were notified about a new photo or friend request, and found yourself still browsing around aimlessly an hour later?
How to Take Control
Dan talks about sending social networking notifications to a separate inbox and dealing with them at specified times instead of the moment each message arrives. I have been doing this with Gmail for a while… it’s very easy to do with Gmail’s “filters” feature.
A filter tells Gmail to grab incoming e-mails that have certain properties, and do something with them. A filter can match all e-mails containing specific keywords, e-mails that come from certain senders, and many other things along those lines.
After telling Gmail what to look for, you must tell Gmail what to do, for example archive the message, delete it, star it, or apply a certain label.
To create a new Gmail filter, click “settings” (top right corner of the screen), click on the “Filters” tab, then click the “Create a new filter” link.
My Social Networking Gmail Filter
I created a label called “Social Networking”, and a filter that matches incoming social networking notification e-mails based on the sender’s e-mail address. When one of these messages is received, it is labeled “Social Networking” and skips the inbox. This filter changes every time I sign up for a new site, but this is what it looks like as of this writing:
Matches: from:(*@facebook.com OR communication@linkedin.com OR no-reply@zooomr.com OR *@facebookmail.com OR robot@upcoming.org OR mail@flickr.com OR pownce@pownce.com OR webmaster@photography-on-the.net OR noreply@twitter.com OR emailhelp@friendfeed.com)
Do this: Skip Inbox, Apply label “Social Networking”
Thanks to this filter, I never see e-mail notifications from social networking sites until I choose to take a look at what is waiting beneath the “Social Networking” label, which is usually no more than once per day.
You can adapt this filter for your own personal use by adding and removing e-mail addresses from the list I have put together.
