Welcome back to part two of this series about the GroupWise Home View. In this post I will cover my mailbox panel and some of the things that I have done to maximize my productivity. In the last post I talked about my task list panel and how I have it filling an entire Home View column. By contrast, my mailbox panel is about half the size, as I don't 'live' in that view all of the time. I use it for triage, in that I look at mails as they come in and make decisions on what to do with them. I either reply immediately, or move it to my task list to work on later. I am not going to go over what I do with it in the task list again, but I will share some of the things I use to process the mails as they come in.

In my mailbox panel I have enabled a couple of view settings that make my life easier as I triage the incoming items. Firstly I have turned on Group Labels, so that all of my mails are grouped under dividers, one for each day. The other thing I have enabled is a new option to GroupWise 8 - Message Preview. This view setting shows the first few lines of the email right in the message list - this allows me to get an idea of what is in the email without actually opening it. That way I am able to judge if the mail is important or not and, if it isn't important I can either just delete it without opening, or leave it for later. As we are all dealing with an increasing amount of email I find these two things alone increase my ability to keep it somewhat under control. I keep my mailbox as empty as possible - most of the time I have under 40 emails in my mailbox folder.

As I open my mails to work on them there are a couple of features that I use to make myself more efficient. There are 2 new tabs on an email, Discussion Thread and Personalize. Discussion thread allow me to quickly see the entire thread that has gone before, no matter where those mails are in my account. I can see if someone else has replied to it, removing the obligation from me or I can get some more context about the matter at hand. This is one of my favourite features of this release. The Personalize tab allows me to make notes right on the email, or add attachments or other emails to the received item, that will help me reply to it later on. This allows me to collect all of the information I need and store it with the context to which it applies.

By triaging effectively I can turn that list of everyone else's priorities (my mailbox) into my own list of priorities (my tasklist). Hope that helps some of you - maybe you can share your thoughts and experiences and the way that you deal with your inbox