Friday, September 01, 2006

"Mark All Read" is evil

Coté says something I've been thinking for a long time.

There is nothing more frustrating than accidentally marking a whole batch of emails or unread articles as "read".

I use "unread marks" in my email to remind me that an action is still outstanding and so removing that mark inadvertently is extraordinarily annoying.

Coté requests a feature that makes it hard to mark all as read. That would be a good start. An "undo" would also be just fine...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Well, I think personal organisation is often a matter of each man to his own. But personally I think keeping actions in your inbox at all is eviler. I've recently started to follow the Getting Things Done model, which definitely advocates not using your inbox for this purpose: because you're mixing incoming (unsorted) items with items you've already processed. The conclusion of this is that your inbox should always be empty (which I mostly seem to manage). Actions go elsewhere - in my case a todo list. Associated emails go in folders.

If you're interested in learning more, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done

Of course all of this says nothing about accidentally hitting the button - that should still be undoable, of course.

Richard Brown said...

Ahhh...... I think I know where I'm going wrong (or at least breaking the GTD rules)...

I specifically use unread marks to allow me to "peek" at emails to give me a heads-up of what's coming and then mark them back as unread to signify that I've not formally read and actioned it yet :-)

Sadly, this seems to violate this rule:

"Never put anything back into 'in'."