Organise Your Emails – Part 2 (Storing and Finding Emails)

For some people this is a massive benefit. In fact, I think that this is of real benefit to just about everybody. But there are some people who will read this and it will revolutionize their way of working.

There are some people, I have known who have been totally overwhelmed by what happens in their email and just following the tips I write about in this article has made them far more productive and happier.

There are 3 problems that this system will solve.

Problem 1: Having a Massively Full Inbox

Some people have never been taught how to manage their emails and often this means that their emails never get managed. Consequently emails just pile up in the inbox. I have seen in-boxes that have thousands of emails in them and finding something specific becomes a major task.

Problem 2: Having an Overly Complex Filing System

In a sense this is the opposite of Problem 1. This is the situation where someone has created a large list  of folders and subfolders. When an email arrives in the inbox it gets dealt with and then filed away. The problem with this approach is that saving and retrieving emails is such a hassle. It takes time and mental energy to decide where to store a particular email then you have to navigate to the correct place to save it. Finding an email is a similarly painful experience.

Problem 3: Never Being Able to Find the Exact Email You Want

This may be because you have a Massively Full Inbox or it may be because you have filed something away and are not sure exactly where it has been put. Consider a simple email from John Smith at Company X that is about a problem they are having using the widget they bought and he wants a refund.

Should you file it under Company X? or John Smith? Is there a folder for “Problems”? or “Widgets”? or “Refunds”?

The Solutions

The main principle is easy and I call it “Keeping an empty Inbox”

When you open up your inbox you should try to empty it. If you cannot do this every time you log on you should at least empty it twice a day. Every morning and every evening you need to empty your inbox.

This is easier than you might think. I know that when I first decided to do this I could not bring myself to do it, so accustomed was I to using the inbox as a sort of todo list.

Believe me, this is a very good thing to do. The inbox is not a todo list. It is not some kind of memo of what needs doing. It should be empty. Trust me this is a very liberating thing to do. Do this and you will never regret it.

Managing Email

It is easy to spend too much time on eMail but it is generally not the most productive task you can expend your effort on. In this section I will cover some techniques for making yourself more productive with managing your emails.

None of these ideas are totally my own, they can all be found on the web (notably at 43 folders). I put them here because they are not widely known about and this section distils their essential goodness in one place.

Email Hygeine

Clear your inbox every time you open it. There, I’ve said it now. Once you embrace this idea there will be no going back, You will feel more organised, more in control and less stressed. What does this involve? Well basically two actions so let’s look at the statement again:

Clear your inbox every time you open it.

Wait a minute, slow down, what do you mean everytime I open it? my Email is open all the time. I respond to my emails as they come in.

As described in the article Organise Your emails – Part 1. Unless you are operating a helpdesk and you need to respond rapidly to emails as they come in then it is a bad idea to have your email program open all day long. You will be constantly facing the threat of being interrupted. You and your work will suffer. Instead, you should make time to open your emails and then, when you have finished, you should close down the email application. For most people this only needs to be once or twice a day. For other people it may be 3 or 4 times a day. Try it, you will be more productive.

The other Action is the clearing down. When you open your inbox you need to empty it totally.

Wait a minute, slow down, you mean, like, totally empty, zero, zilch, nada, nowt. That can’t apply to me because I need to use the inbox to remind me about all the things that I have to do, and all the things I am awaiting a response to and all the great jokes that I like to reread every couple of hours.

That’s exactly it – your inbox should be totally emptied. This idea can be found in many places and David Allen has pretty much built a career on it with his “Getting Things Done” books. It does make a lot of sense. It genuinely frees up your mind for thinking about more important things. Having a busy inbox adds stress to your thought processes.

When you receive an email you need to do one of three things to it:

1. Delete it – either after reading it or, if it is obviously garbage, before you read it. Some emails should be deleted automatically for you by your spam filters if you have configured them properly.
2. Respond to it immediately and then file it (and your response) away.
3. File it away somewhere for later action.

I will elaborate on these shortly but for now you just have to realise that whenever you open your email inbox you are going to do one of the above three things to each piece of mail. When you have finished processing the inbox you are going to close down your email program.

Do this and you will reclaim your inbox

Filing emails

For many years the general consensus with emails has been to save them in heirarchical folders when they are finished with. There was also a school of thought that suggested that the email program should filter for you prior to reading them and flag up the folders that need attending to. I have tried both of these options and always found that I was spending too much time on filing and retrieving emails or just generally messing about with the email filters.

The problem was that I too often had to think about where to file a particular email, and many months later I had to try to remember my thought processes to determine where I had filed it. Too many times I was unable to find something that I was pretty sure was in there somewhere. It was also difficult to make changes to the filing system without disrupting the existing pattern

Technology has moved on a bit and I now file our emails in a different way.

I only have five folders:

1. Action
2. Archive
3. Read These
4. Respond
5. Waiting For

For every email that I process I first of all ask myself should I delete it? If the answer is yes then it gets deleted immediately.

If the email requires some urgent response or is very quick to do then I do that response immediately and then file the email and its response away in the Archive folder.

If I receive an email and it requires me to do something (other than respond) but is not particularly urgent I file it in the “Action” folder. At the end of the day this folder gets dealt with and emptied.

All emails, apart from ones that I (or the Spam filter) have deleted end up eventually in the “Archive” folder It is a vast sprawling container that has all emails sent and received that I have chosen to retain. There are no subfolders, no labels, no tags or anything, just emails – and lots of them.

If I receive an email and it requires me to simply read it but is not particularly urgent I file it in the “Read These” folder. Typically the sorts of things that are put in the “Read These” folder are low priority stuff like newsletters.

Periodically the content of this folder  gets read and its contents get archived. About once a month the contents of the “Read These”  folder are checked by date order and if any items have been stored in there too long they get either deleted or filed in the Archive folder. I think that if something has been in there for over a month and not been read then it is not as urgent or important as originally thought and so will be removed or archived.

If I receive an email and it requires me to respond but is not particularly urgent I file it in the “Respond” folder. If it is urgent then I do it immediately and file it away in the Archive. But if it is not urgent then it gets put in this folder. At the end of the day this folder gets dealt with and emails are transferred to the “Archive” folder.

If I am awaiting a response or an action from someone else regarding some email I have sent them then I file the email in the “Waiting For” folder. At the end of the day this folder gets dealt with and finished with email get transferred to the “Archive” folder.

For people who are not particularly busy I suspect they can usually get by with just two folders: An “Active”folder for messages-in-progress and an “Archive” folder for messages that users are done with.

This new way of storing our emails is much quicker, simpler, less stressful and more accurate.

Finding eMails

The thing that has changed to allow this to be done is search technology. It is now far easier to use a search utility to find the emails I am looking for than it is to rummage around a folder tree. At the time of writing, there are about 50 applications you can install that will do this for you and most of them are free of charge. The best I have found are Copernic, Google Desktop and Yahoo Desktop. Just download and install and after an initial indexing (usually requiring a couple of hours) they are fast, effective and very easy to use.

I personally use Google Desktop search to find any emails that I might want to revisit.

A Compromise

OK, I recognise this approach is scary. Especially if you are used to having all your customers information stored each in their own folder. So let’s suggest a compromise.

Use the folder system described above but inside the Archive folder create a subfolder called “Customers” and create subfolders in that one for each customer. For the bulk of all emails put them directly in the Archive folder but treat your Customers differently.

If you feel that you cannot go directly to our system then try this as a step towards it.

Tags: Email, Organize, Tips