One aspect of my life I’m working on improving this year is removing a lot of clutter that has built up in my life. I look around my bedroom and ask myself: “Why?”. Why did I choose to buy that, put it there and at the end of the day, does it really need to be there at all?

By asking myself these questions I’m able to give a yes or no answer and chuck it if necessary or keep it if it’s something that I use every day and has worth.

Here’s one example, my desk. It used to have resting on it: my MacBook Pro, a Griffin Elevator, wireless keyboard and mouse, various cables, books and notepads and of course, a stack of post-it notes. I’m not going to go through every item and tell you in detail the decision I came to when I asked myself these questions, but as an example. “Don’t I have an application that works just as well as post-it notes?”.

You might be asking, why sorting through clutter and minimising the items you own and use matters. I think the answer lies in the word focus. To me focussing is exemplified by being able to get on with a job without getting caught up in unnecessary distractions (I don’t even want to think how many times I checked Twitter when writing this post) and getting on with what really matters, the task at hand.

By removing those items that we don’t really need in our lives, we’re in fact reducing the amount of trivial decisions we have to make and instead of working out the best way of doing a task, we’re able to simply get on with it.

This year, I’d like to be able to be in a position where many of my day to day items can fit in a backpack, and not feel the need to overpack for every eventuality, because there are less of them, but just have what is needed to get the job done. I would suggest that it’s a good idea to ask yourselves these questions if you want to remove the clutter in your life so you can get on to the task at hand, after all; the less things you have, the less things you have to worry about.

It’s not a pleasant sight when you get up in the morning, to find that your inbox is stacked up with over fifty new messages, all varying with importance and you have no idea where to start. Recently, I’ve made an effort to organize my email more appropriately and be more objective with what is relevant and what isn’t. Say you’ve got five emails telling you that you’ve got a new Twitter follower and an important email buried far below – you’ve got to decide which is more important to you.

Enter Rules. A solution that has been built into Apple’s Mail application for years, but has gone unnoticed by many. Rules happens to be the most useful asset I have found in Mail to date, and believe me, you’ll find a use for them, if not today – someday. So what does Rules do? It’s pretty much an automated filing system for your email that uses conditions that you set. Now, at first Rules can seem very daunting and may take a bit of time and experimentation to set up – but after you’ve spent that first half an hour you’ll find it second nature and very intuitive.

Creating a Rule

My aim in this guide is to streamline and cut down that thirty minutes into ten at the most. Firstly, you’re going to need to head over to the Rules preference pane. Go, Mail, Preferences and then to the Rules tab on the preference pane (see below). You’ll find that Apple already has a preset Rule about emails from them – you can ignore it or delete it, by doing so you won’t effect anything that this guide will be looking at.

Next, you’re obviously going to want to click the ‘add rule’ button which will bring down a menu for setting up rules. From here you’ve got quite a few options to mess around with. First of all, it’s probably a good idea to give it an appropriate name instead of something ambiguous. Next you’ve got to choose if all the terms you’ll be laying down have to be followed or just one of them – in doing to you’ll allow emails to move into a certain mailbox in your sidebar. To put this in perspective:

Say I wanted an email to be sent to me every time one of my posts got commented on and I wanted all those emails to go into a mailbox named ‘Project X’ in Mail’s sidebar. However, I also wanted any other emails that I received from my co-editors mentioning Project X that I received to go into that same folder. If I chose the “any” option – only one of the requirements would have to be met for Mail to put it into the Project X mailbox, however, if I chose the “all” option, the emails would have to meet both the requirements and therefore the emails about comments wouldn’t go into the folder because it was not from an editor – as I had requested.

Extra Options

It gets quite easy from here on out, you now need to choose what you want Mail to look in when it sees an email. This can vary from who the email was from, the date it was sent on, or even if the email was sent from someone in your address book. After this you’ve got to give Mail a little more information about the text your going to be defining later on. The email may have to contain a phrase, begin or end with something – there are a couple of other options available for you that I won’t go into at the moment.

Now that you’ve allowed Mail to chose the right emails thanks to your parameters – what do you want it to do with them? In the case of Desktop Vibes, I have those emails sent to a mailbox called ‘Desktop Vibes’. However there are some other, pretty cool scenarios that you could put together if you wanted.

Here are a few I came up with:

• Once you’ve replied to an email – have it archived or even deleted.
• Any emails you receive from social networks can go straight into one ‘Social’ folder, so you can reach the important correspondence.
• Do you get a lot of school assignments via email? Give them their own mailbox!
• Want to ingore all those

Conclusion

Rules turns Mail from one of those applications that you like into one that you love. That’s big. So go and have a mess around with Rules in Mail. You’ll soon find it a lot easier to reach that magic inbox number – zero.

Do you use Rules in Apple Mail (or any other email application) to help sift through all of that mail? If so, how do you use it?