The email trick behind never missing Bath's events

Bath rewards people who plan ahead. The good tables at the festival restaurants go weeks in advance, the Christmas Market accommodation sells out by September, and the smaller events that make the city interesting are often announced once and never mentioned again. Miss the announcement and you miss the thing entirely.

Most of us try to keep up by signing up for everything. The problem is not that you signed up for too much. It is that everything lands in the same place so you miss what's actually worth your attention.

Give 'What's on' its own email address

Set up a second address used purely for venues, listings and event mailing lists. Sign up to as many as you like, because none of it interrupts anything. Once a week, or whenever you are deciding what to do on the weekend, open it and read the lot in one sitting.

What was previously a stream of interruptions becomes a single browsing session, which is a far more enjoyable way to encounter it.

Why it works better than it sounds

Event mail is only useful the moment you are choosing what to do. Read at any other time it is noise, and noise trains you to ignore the source. Batching it means you arrive with the intention of finding something, which is exactly when a festival announcement is welcome rather than irritating. It also means signing up to a new venue carries no cost, so you can be generous about it.

Keeping your details yours

Event sign-ups are traded and shared more than most people assume, and a single ticket purchase can produce mail from companies you have never heard of. Using an email provider that encrypts contents and does not scan them for advertising keeps that under control, and having the whole lot on a separate address means you can abandon it entirely if it ever gets out of hand.

Where to point it

Start with the venues you already know, then widen. Our guide to things to do in Bath is a reasonable map of what is worth following, covering the attractions and independents that you might otherwise miss. For the practical side, the council website carries road closures, park events and licensing notices that rarely appear anywhere else and frequently affect whether an evening goes smoothly.

Ten minutes now, a better festival season

This is a small piece of housekeeping with an unusually good return. It costs one evening of setting up and removes the low-level guilt of an inbox full of things you meant to read. More usefully, it means the next time somebody asks what is happening this weekend, you will actually know.

One extra habit helps enormously during festival season. When something catches your eye, forward it straight to your main address with the date in the subject line. It takes three seconds and turns a vague intention into something you will actually see again in time to book, which is where most good plans fall apart.