Organizing Your Email
These are my tips on organizing your email.
Email has dramatically increased the volume of communications and the amount of information that you need to process every day. To keep up, you must sort, file, respond to, or delete every email that comes to you during a business day.
Managing Business Email
When you are looking for an important document in a stack of papers you have not filed properly, you quickly realize that a little bit or organization could have saved you a lot of time and frustration. What is true for your filing cabinet is equally true for your email inbox. A cluttered email inbox will not only frustrate you, it can also hinder your productivity and distract you from other obligations. So let us consider ways to organize your business emails in order to manage your time and work effectively and efficiently.
The first rule is to keep your inbox as empty as possible. It seems obvious to say, but the fewer emails you have in your inbox, the less you have to deal with. Keeping your inbox free of clutter also means it is easier to identify the messages that demand your immediate attention. One way to keep your inbox as empty as possible is to handle business-related email as soon as it arrives. Another way to reduce your inbox size is to regularly delete junk email and old email that you do not need anymore. You can also organize incoming email into different categories or subjects, each with its own folder in your email client.
From there, you can decide which emails need to be handled and at what time. This should streamline your inbox, leaving it with only relevant email messages that you need immediately, or that require a response. Deleting unnecessary emails and organizing your email are good ways to deal with the messages you have already received. But what about cutting off some of the flow before it reaches you? Try to prevent your inbox from becoming jammed up by eliminating the sources of unnecessary emails. If you are on email lists or have subscribed to news groups, you probably receive many emails you do not really need.
Product alerts and newsletter can also add to the pile. Despite the assurances you are given that your email address will be kept private, subscribing to these services can increase the chances that you will receive more spam. Do not subscribe to services that will result in emails arriving in your business mailbox, unless you really need them for your work. You can usually unsubscribe from a service by using the service's website, or sending an email. Even if you need a service, you can usually restrict the communications you receive. For example, specify that you do not want to receive any promotional content. Or opt to receive a daily digest instead of several individual messages. Following these simple techniques will help you avoid the problem of serious email overload.
Keeping Personal Email Separate
Work related email messages alone can clog up your email account. But when you add in personal emails, it becomes harder to spot the important business messages. This just adds confusion and wastes time. If you are getting personal emails when you are at work, the first step to better management is to set up separate business and personal email accounts. Separating these accounts keeps your business and personal emails, and those parts of your life, separate. It also enables you to use your time at work more efficiently. Your personal email can be handled at another time, when you are not working. Check to see if your company's email program supports multiple inboxes. You may be able to get permission to set up two separate accounts, each with its own email address, one for business and one for personal email.
Remember though, you really should not be dealing with personal communications during work. Your employer may be legally entitled to check your email. And if personal messages you receive are sensitive or offensive, they may end up causing you embarrassment or even disciplinary action. Whether your personal account is set up at work or at home, you need to ask your personal contacts not to email you at your business account. People will probably appreciate that your business account is for work only and that all personal emails, especially forwarded emails, should go to your personal account. You can also help to manage your work hours more effectively if you designate a time for handling personal email. Read, organize, and reply to personal email outside of work hours, so you keep focused when you need to get your work done. Following these steps can help you manage the time you spend on email at work, allowing you to focus only on business related messages without distractions.
Deleting Emails
If you look at your email inbox, you will probably notice only a few of the emails are truly important. When you are feeling swamped, you may be tempted to start deleting anything unnecessary, but then you risk deleting important emails. So, how do you decide which emails you can delete? Let us look at those types of emails that are ripe for deletion. First up are those emails that just need a quick read, but no further action from you. For example, a short thank you note from a colleague contains nothing you need for future reference. And does not require a reply, read it then delete it. You can also delete emails that are not required anymore.
For example, reminders for meetings that have already passed or newsletters of no real value. However, be careful not to delete emails you may need for future reference. For instance, some project related emails may be needed even after a project closes. Another category of emails to delete are messages that are not work related, such as jokes, and friendship forwards. These kinds of emails not only clutter your email account, but also are more likely to contain material that may be offensive.
Cut these emails off that source by asking senders to stop putting you on these messages. If that does not work, set your email client to delete messages automatically from specific senders. Spam is the most obvious type of email to delete. These unsolicited advertisements or junk mail can jam up your inbox. Creating frustration and thwarting productivity. You can usually identify spam by reading the subject line, or the first few lines of an email. These often tell you that the email is an unsolicited promotional offer. As a rule, delete spam as soon as you receive it.
Be wary of unsolicited emails that use garbled subject lines including special characters to try to draw your attention. Confusing or tricky subject lines can be a ploy to peak your curiosity, enticing you to open the message. If you do open the message your computer may very well end up infected with a virus. Avoid this potential trap completely by deleting these emails without opening them. Along the same lines, it is particularly important to delete messages from unknown senders that have suspicious subject lines.
These emails could be spam or worse, they could infect your computer with viruses. If the subject line seems odd to you and you do not know the sender, delete the email immediately without opening it. If you have already opened an email and you feel even slightly suspicious, do not open any attachments it may contain. Opening an attachment could allow a virus or other malicious software to run on your computer. One of the best ways to make your business email easier to manage is to delete these and other unnecessary messages from your mailbox. Doing this can help defeat email anxiety, and give you a sense of control.
Using Folders
Deleting emails you do not need can help you avoid being overwhelmed by email. But how can you prevent the important messages you hold on to from turning into a bewildering pile of information? The most effective solution is to organize your email using folders. Email programs consist of an inbox and basic folders for outgoing, sent, deleted, and draft email messages. But to manage your email more efficiently, create additional folders.
Let us explore a few guidelines for creating folders that will make your email easier to manage. Stop thinking of the inbox as a place to store email. Instead, treat it as a temporary holding place before you categorize your emails into folders that accurately reflect their area of relevance. Each folder you create should have a particular purpose and be named accordingly. Do not select a purpose so specific that it applies to very few emails. Nor should it be so general that the folder becomes full enough to resemble an extra inbox.
Try to create a balanced number of folders, fitting your needs. Having too many, or too few, will make it more difficult to organize your email. What are the action items you deal with? Make these action items the basis of the folders and folder names you create. If you are a writer, for example, you might base your folder structure on the phases of your document review cycle. So you would create folders named, "for editing", "edits to implement", and "completed documents".
Folders can also be named based on the subjects of the different sorts of email you receive regularly. For instance, you may create separate folders for each client or project you are working on. A folder for administrative email, one for emails about company events, and one for newsletters and subscriptions. Treat the amil you send in the same way as incoming email. File sent items into folders relating to their purposes. You might want to organize sent and received mail relating to the same purpose into the same folder. Or perhaps create a folder with the same name within your sent folder.
You also want to avoid clogging up your mailbox with too many messages that are out of date. A folder will not help much if it contains hundreds of old messages. Fortunately, email applications have an automatic archiving feature that saves you from having to root out old messages and store them somewhere else yourself. Once you enable the archiving feature, it automatically moves items you no longer use into a separate storage folder. You can decide when an email message in your mailbox is ready for archiving. You can also decide if and when you want the archiving feature to operate automatically. Once you get the hang of folders and archiving, you will be able to clear a path to a more user friendly inbox.
Using Filters
Using a clear set of folders to organize your email makes managing your email quicker and easier. But it defeats the purpose if you have to spend too much time sorting all the email in your inbox and filing it to the right folders. Fortunately, a solution is available in the form of filters. Filters are rules you can establish to move certain kinds of email directly to the folders in which they belong.
There are a number of different ways to specify which emails must be routed to a particular folder. You can specify that all messages from a particular email address must be routed to a relevant folder. For instance, most of your email traffic comes from either your manager or your organization's main client. So you set up separate folders to receive the email messages from these two addresses. You can also set any email that includes certain words in its subject line or body to be routed to a folder on a particular subject. Emails can also be routed to folders based on who the message is addressed to.
For example, you may use one folder for emails addressed to you only and another for emails that use a company wide distribution list. How do you filter in a way that avoids emails getting misrouted, mixed up with unrelated emails, or even lost? Well, there are some guidelines you can follow to set up effective filters. First, use precise terms as the criteria for filtering incoming email. It is worth taking a little time and investing some careful thought in specifying accurate terms to use in your filters.
Filtering your email based on the sender's address is easy. But it is not always an effective way to manage your messages, especially if you get lots of emails on different subjects from a particular person. It often makes more sense to use filter terms specific to your email folders. For example, you could specify that all messages containing a term like leave or vacation are routed to your "days off" folder. Or all emails on a particular project are routed to a folder with that project name. Bear in mind, using specific words to filter emails is effective only if you know emails you receive about a specific subject will actually contain these terms. You may need to ask people who email you to use those specific terms in their email subject lines.
Suppose you are managing a project for a company. You ask your colleagues to use the name of the company in the subject line for all their product related emails. This will enable you to route all relevant messages directly to that company folder you created. Follow these guidelines to set up effective filters that automate email organizing for you.
Searching for Email Information
Using techniques for managing your inbox will make dealing with your business emails a lot easier, but they will not solve every problem. For example, what if you misplace an email containing important information? Let us examine three ways of dealing with the common problem of mislaid emails. First, try searching for the email by entering a keyword or phrase you know it contains into the search feature of your email problem. When the search is complete, the results are displayed in the form of a list of all emails that meet your search criteria. That is useful, but sometimes a search still leaves you with a mountain of mails to check.
How do you make your search effective? It is a good idea to keep your search terms as precise as possible. This refines search results, making it easier to locate your mislaid email. For example, if you are looking for an email from "mike smith", his name is the most precise search term. If you use a less precise search term, such as 'smith" alone, you could end up with some irrelevant results from other people with the surname "smith". Forgetting an exact spelling that was used in an email can make it difficult to enter a precise search term.
You can get around this using a character known as a wildcard, which is a substitute for another unknown character. The wildcard can be any symbol but is usually denoted by an asterisk. Let us say you cannot recall whether a client's surname is spelled 'smith', with an I, or 'smyth', with a y. Replacing the disputed letter with an asterisk will produce a list of all emails from people who spell the surname in either way. Bear in mind however, not all email programs accept wildcards.
Another way to locate a lost email is to use your email program's built in sorting mechanism to help find a particular email. In the folders of most email programs, email is displayed in a list with several columns. These columns contain important information, such as the sender's name, the email subject, and the date the email was received. When you click the column header, the email program rearranges the listed emails according to the category of information you have clicked.
If you only know the date the email arrived, for example, you click on the date column, allowing you to browse the rearranged list, looking for emails received on that date. Finally, if neither of these approaches help you find the missing email, you can always contact the original sender and ask this person to resend the email. These tips will help you avoid the frustration you may feel when an important email slips through the net and your otherwise organized inbox.