I’ve always been a huge fan of the Inbox Zero philosophy that Merlin Mann probably gets shitloads of money to travel around giving talks about. A huge fan, that is, in the same way I’m a huge fan of Medicins Sans Frontieres, but hey; I’m not a doctor. Or the same way I’m a huge fan of keep on living for a good long while yet, but hey; I loves me some red meat, cigarettes and booze.

I’ll never really get to grips with Inbox Zero, or GTD, mainly because my particular situation needs a slightly different approach. One concept I do find extremely attractive is the “Get it out of your head and put it where it belongs”-concept that is core in both of these philosophies. Although I don’t receive thousands of emails a day important stuff can quickly get buried in the “Who left their donkey in my parking space” and “Joe Dohn is out on parole. Coffee and cake at two.” garbage that tends to permeate any organization.

Another things I really like is… hotkeys. Betcha that came as a surprise. ¹ So of course I found that unless I could hit a key combo and then have the email in question magically transferred to the folder designated (I use “Todo”, “Reference”, “Archive” and “Trash”. That last one already has a hotkey.) this just wasn’t going to work. Hence this AppleScript:

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tell application "Mail"
	set s to selection
	repeat with eachMessage in s
		set read status of eachMessage to false
		move eachMessage to mailbox "ToDo"
	end repeat
end tell
tell application "GrowlHelperApp"
	set the allNotificationsList to ¬
		{"InBox Zero!"}
	set the enabledNotificationsList to ¬
		{"InBox Zero!"}
	register as application ¬
		"Mail Move" all notifications allNotificationsList ¬
			default notifications enabledNotificationsList ¬
		icon of application "Mail"
	notify with name ¬
		"InBox Zero!" title ¬
		"InBox Zero!" description ¬
	"Moved to Folder : "ToDo" application name "Mail Move"
end tell

The real meat of the script is actually in the first seven lines. Those will take your selected email, set the read-status to false (scrap or comment out line 4 if you don’t want the status changed) and move it to the folder of your desire. The rest of the script is prettification to make Growl do a notification that the task has been carried out because I found that more reassuring than just having the email disappear and taking at face value that it ended up in the right folder. If you don’t use Growl, get your head checked and throw away everything from line 8 and out.

This script is of course only valuable when attached to a hotkey trigger. I used Quickeys to do this because I’m having issues with QuickSilver’s scope functionality, but it should work fine as long as you assign hotkeys that aren’t in use already. (By QuickSilver. It overrides system hotkeys)