Organizing Your Email
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 numerous 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.
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.
