Author: W.P. Flinn, Updated
12/7/05
If you're like most people in the modern workplace, even
those who work in a small office, you get an average of twenty or so emails a
day. I work in a large IT department of an agency in the Federal
Government. As you can imagine, my email inbox
gets a lot of traffic. I get tasking messages from managers and colleagues, and
email from our offices all over the United States asking about various aspects
of the duties that I perform. If I were to let those twenty or so daily emails just sit
in my inbox, I would find it harder and harder to sort through the important
messages, and find the ones that have the information that I really need
later. In this article, I want to share a few hints and tips that have
worked for me to help keep the inbox manageable, and to help find those
important messages when you need them later.
Reading Your Email:
The fundamental concept that will help
keep you sane in the insane world of email is to keep your inbox cleared out!
There should be as few messages in the "inbox" folder as possible. Read your email, decide its
importance, and either delete it or put it where you can easily find it.
Make reading and filing your email a scheduled event if necessary. Find a
time in your busy day that you can regularly sit down and go through your
messages.
Once you read them you can quickly determine if it is a task
someone is giving to you, some important information you might need later, a
new policy in the office, or just plain junk. The last type of email that I
mentioned (the junk) is
easy... delete it! Better yet, put that email filtering feature to
work for you, and prevent the garbage from even reaching your inbox in the
first place. As I will discuss in just a bit, if you read a message
and it has a new task or important policy information, you can easily file
it in a folder that will help you keep on top of the important stuff and get
those "action items" done.
Create a Folder System:
One of the most important things that I have found is that
keeping the clutter out of the inbox is the first step in helping to keep things
organized. To help me do this, I have created a folder system that helps
me to "file" my messages in a place where I can easily recognize the
subject, and to retrieve notes that I will need at a later time. Organize
your folder list, and name the folders something that will help you identify
what is being kept in them. For instance, in addition to the usual
"inbox," "sent," "trash,' and "drafts"
folders that are already there, I have created a folder structure that separates the many functions that
I am involved in. I have an "Action"
folder, and folders for various things like team meetings, committee
meetings, publishers/vendors, and others that help me sort out my messages
by topic.
The "Action" Folder:
The action folder deserves some special mention. It is
in here that I immediately move my messages containing time sensitive or
other tasking messages that I receive from others. It sort of becomes
a "to-do" list. I read a message in my inbox, and if it is
worthy of the "action" folder, I move it there right away. I
look in my action folder at the beginning of the day, and again before I go
home. I can get an idea of deadlines and urgent replies that I need to
pay attention to. Once I have completed the required action, I delete
the message, or archive it in the "Filed Messages" folder.
Like the inbox, you want to keep your "Action" folder cleared out
as much as possible. Little clutter here means that you are responding
to those important issues quickly, and will help you easily identify tasks
yet to be done.
The "Other" Folders:
Don't forget to check those other folders once in
awhile. It would be too easy to forget that you stashed all of
those messages somewhere unless you go back and at least review the subject
lines. Be sure to clean out the old messages once in awhile as
well. If you were saving that piece of email for some information that
you thought you would need later, transfer that information to a more
permanent place, such as your address book, to-do list, calendar or Palm Pilot.
Delete the messages that aren't serving a purpose any more. Above all,
don't play the old "shell game" with your email. Shuffling
messages from folder to folder may give you the feeling that you are staying
organized, but you are really just sweeping the dirt under the rug, so to
speak. Act on it, or get rid of it! I have a simple rule of
thumb: If it has been in another folder all year, chances are
that I either have the information I need from it, or it just doesn't matter
any more :)
Emailing Yourself:
I personally don't do this much, but other people have
mentioned that this helps them to remember which messages they have
responded to. My replies go into a "Sent" folder, and I just
look in there when I need to know which replies I have sent out. You
may want that extra assurance, however. You can very easily include
yourself as a CC or BCC on a message, and have a copy of it sent to you when
you send it out.
While I'm on the subject of having a copy
of a sent message - for many short replies or short messages to others, you may
not even need a copy of the sent message at all. Remember - every email
you save, even those in the "sent" folder takes up space. If it is your
computer at home, you are eating up valuable disk space. If it is at work,
your friendly email administrators have to back that stuff up - which takes
resources. If it is you Internet Service Provider, and you are
leaving copies of al your email on the ISP server, that email takes up space -
and most ISPs limit the amount of space on their server that you can occupy.
If your email program has an option to do so, have it prompt you each time
whether or not to even save a copy of your outgoing messages.
Be a Good Email Netizen:
Chances are that someone else that you are emailing is
trying to keep themselves organized as well. Be a good "netizen"
and put a subject in your email! That's what the subject box is for,
and it makes it much easier to scan a list of messages when you are trying
to find one that you need later. I know one of my pet peeves is when
people send me email with no subject... then I have to read it to find out
if it is important or just junk mail. With all the SPAM email, I have
filters on my email that automatically deletes messages without subjects.
If you send me an email without a subject, I may not even receive it.
Another annoying thing is when
people use the subject box to type the first sentence, or even the entire
message of their email.
That first sentence makes for a loooooooong subject line, often has nothing
whatsoever to do with what the email is about, and makes it extremely
confusing later when I am searching for a specific subject. Be nice to
your readers, put a succinct SUBJECT in there!
When you respond to an email by hitting "Reply with
history" be sure to edit the included history to keep the email from
"growing" as it is sent back and forth. When emails get volleyed
back and forth as part of an ongoing discussion, they tend to grow and grow as
the appended history grows from the discussions that have been taking
place. Be sure to "snip" out the parts that are no longer germane
to the discussion thread. This will help eliminate confusion and
frustration (and storage space), as your reader tries to sift through the history to find out what
questions this particular email is answering.
Wrapping It All Up:
Staying organized in the world of email is often a difficult
task. With a little planning and organization, however, you can make this
daily chore a little less painful, and make your messages a little more easy to
work with. Keep out the clutter, and especially keep your inbox cleared
out. Create an "Action Folder" as a way to keep track of those
messages that require immediate attention. Schedule some time every day to
read through your emails and file them. Do some housekeeping
periodically. And finally.... don't simply shuffle email from folder to
folder. Act on it, transfer the information to a more permanent place such
as an address book or to-do list, and then get rid of it! Be a good
netizen and use subject lines. You'll find that keeping on top of your
daily messages will be a bit more organized, and a lot more manageable.
