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I’ve been busy. I have three blog posts that are nearly written. A preview: “the Survey Generation,” “My Wife and the Powerbook,” and “My Pug is Cute.”

OK, the last blog post is just a given.

Lately, my infamous e-mail load, that Greg Knauss and Merlin Mann have blogged about as well, has gone up. It has gone up to the point where my life is haunted by the non-zero inbox, and the thought of getting through my FollowUp folder is a distant dream. I’m trying out a few different methods of organization. So here’s a brief overview:

MailTags – Mailtags is a meta-data plugin for Apple Mail. It adds to Apple Mail the ability to do folksonomic tags (I made that word!) on all your mail, as well as flag it as a profile. MailTags has a Spotlight enabler that lets you search by tags, by project, etc. As well, you can set rules to tag certain posts, or mark them as belonging to a project.

Smart Folders works perfectly on it. Its amazing really, how nice it works. It has this handy donate button it, and I was seriously tempted to press it. I will to. The only problem is this:

I spent the first day of usage diligently tagging and marking as projects. I was on top of the world! 423 messages later, at the end of the day, I had this chunk of raw conversational data that I could parse, slice and blend into all sorts of contextual meaning. And it did. I did searches on the tag “annoy” or “bastard” or “fuck_this_shit” and I found what I needed.

And then it all fell apart at day two.

You see, MailTag works well when you can maintain careful control over the spigot. But when the spigot turns to a firehose (catch the Mike Watt reference…) it has no chance. The reason? The interface of tagging a message is not as seamless as it should be. Whereas I have delicious posting, and Ecto posting down to few clicks and taps, tagging took too many.

Usually, I can just type command-R to reply, type something, then shift-command-D to send the message. Adding something to this key-stroke flow has to be seamless, because if it is not, it disrupts the zen like calm I try to maintain. When you have in excess of 500 messages a day (as I did today), if you disrupt the flow with a single mouse movement, it doesn’t work.

So what would make me use MailTags again (because it is indeed useful)? Mailtags needs to add the ability to tag as a “tab” sequence. Basically: command-N (new), subject – tab – message – tab – tags – shift-command-D to send. That would rock.

You find as a frenetic, hyperactive and super busy mac user, that the more you can do from the keyboard, the better. Bless multi-button mice, expose. Bless the Microsoft Natural Elite 4000 keyboard thingy with its arrow buttons (assigned to track-forward and backward in iTunes).

So my advice to the MailTags crew: integrate the “tag” and “project” boxes in the tab-sequence for text-fields in the message window. If you do that my friends, I will seriously, personally send you a stack of Warner Bros Records CD’s. Seriously. Please.