Just a quickie. I'm leaving for a trip tomorrow morning and I realized that I needed to review all the Action item emails that I've been filing into my Apple Mail _Action folder. I wanted to be able to convert them into GTD *next actions*. So I dug up my copy of Mail to FileMaker Importer and tried it out on my _Action folder of email with about 150 emails in it. It worked!
I captured all the emails painlessly into the included Email Archive file. But I then needed the action fields and project fields and such to really work with these emails as to do items.
So I added three tables to my business database in FileMaker 7: Actions, Projects and EmailArchive. My EmailArchive is just the end result fields that are in the Email Archive file the Mail to FM Importer uses such as date, sender, subject, body, to, etc.
I created a relationship between my Email Archive and Actions based on Email Number (a number I assigned as an auto-enter serial). Then I imported the _Action folder email records into my Actions table - only importing the email number. I also imported the records in my EmailArchive table. Then I put the date, sender, subject and body of the emails from the related EmailArchive table onto my Action layout.
This let me go through each email one at a time and enter a next action on it or mark it to archive. Worked like a charm!!! I felt very happy taking these unprocessed emails and deciding what the next step was. It makes all the difference.
More later as I get the projects aspect going too. It's started but not easy enough yet to link the actions to projects. This is a great way to discover projects I see. When I stumble upon them as I try to make emails into NAs, I just suggest to myself that this is going to require more than one action and I need to create a project out of it as the next action.
I've been scouring the web to find software tools that will let me process emails as to do items on a Mac. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that FileMaker could help.