A few days ago I wrote about some of the things I do that help me maintain inbox zero.
I've also gotten into a messy habit of using my inbox as a sort of catch-all. I schedule emails to myself with random thoughts that I don't want to forget. I save links for articles that I want to read, but don't have time for right now. And of course there's regular mail.
I like being able to find all of this in one place. But this is a lot to manage. So I've started building a productivity app to help me.
Hold My Mail
The idea with this app is to take control of when things are hitting my inbox. When you sign up for the app, you're given a unique email address that you can use for newsletters or any other mail that you don't need to see in your inbox as soon as it's sent.
When mail is sent to your Hold My Mail email address, it isn't delivered to your inbox right away — it's held (that's where I got the name!). You can specify when you want your mail to be delivered. I typically like to check my inbox early in the morning, so I have it set up to collect all my newsletters and deliver them every Saturday morning.
So instead of emails throughout the week, I get one email with a digest of all the mail I've received.
Hold My Links
I've also made a simple browser extension called Hold My Link that I can use to easily save any link.
This saves the link to my Hold My Mail account, where I can access it later.
Every link I've saved since my last digest will be listed in the next digest that I receive.
Future Updates
I have some ideas for features I can add to make this a more valuable tool for me. One of the things I would like to add is a Hold My Notes section. I’m not entirely sure what that implementation will look like. I've been thinking it would be nice to hook it up to Twilio so I can just text my random notes to a phone number and have them end up in my account. But I'm not sure if that's the route I'll take or if I'll go another direction.