Now, wait a minute: That’s bacn, not bacon.

Anyway … if you don’t know, bacn is a term that emerged from PodCamp Pittsburgh 2 last August and refers to e-mail you receive that isn’t spam but isn’t exactly a personal e-mail, either. It’s mail you want to receive — but just not right now.

Still stumped? Bacn comprises things like news alerts and friend requests you receive from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and your other social networks.

The real problem with bacn is that it quickly clutters up your inbox throughout the day and creates far too many not-so-urgent one-off requests for your already fractured attention span.

What you need is a system that empowers you to process your incoming bacn (is there such a thing as outgoing bacn?) all at once and on your own terms, so that it doesn’t constantly interrupt your work flow.

Here’s my suggestion on how to do that:

Filter, filter, filter

If you’re using Gmail, Outlook or another e-mail client that allows filters, create a set of rules that will redirect all of your bacn messages out of your inbox and into a separate folder that you can check and power through once a day or once every other day.

In my Gmail account, e-mail messages that contain any of the following phrases in their subject line are automatically removed from the inbox, sent to my “BACN” filter, and archived:

• “is now following you on Twitter”
• “added you as a friend on Facebook”
• “has added you as a business connection”
• “added you as a business connection on Pulse”
• “Invitation to connect on LinkedIn”
• “just started following your Utterz”
• “has requested your trust on Spock”
• “Add me as a friend on Pownce!”

Cooking your bacn

What’s the method to your madness in ensuring bacn doesn’t zap your productivity?

(Creative Commons image from Dulcie’s Flickr photostream.)

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