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If you followed yesterday’s advice, your inbox is now relatively empty. There may be a few messages that have arrived since then, but I expect that it looks considerably different today, than it did yesterday. What you’re experiencing is more than a simple sense of pride that you are now living with a clear inbox. It’s really a new found sense of freedom that comes with the victory of winning the battle. For those of you that didn’t take my advice, or have yet to read that blog, you may want to go back and do so now. If you don’t, you’ll never know how the rest of us are feeling right now. Now that we’ve taken the first step, we have to move on and implement the next step of this process or we’ll quickly be back in the same shape were in before we started this whole process. So, let’s move into the next step in this process and setup our email workspace in a way that will make it easy to keep our inbox clean.
Sticking with the same theme that I started with (the Inbox/Outbox that may sit on your desk) it’s important to understand that we’re going to need a little more for the electronic version. There are lots of options, but organization is the biggest issue, so let’s get organized. That starts by creating a few simple folders. You can create more if it makes sense… In fact, I have more. The basics of this begin with less than a handful of folders. It’s likely that your email client (Outlook being one such application) will have some folders already created. Folders like, Inbox, Drafts, sent items, deleted items, etc. Those are a good start, so let’s keep them and add a few more. I would suggest that you start with a small set of “working folders” and build from there as you find the need. We create these “working folders” to hold the messages that you can’t act on right away or are in need of some type of temporary support material for a current issue or current conversation. For now, let’s create these folders: Answer, Hold and Read. You may want to create a folder called “Working” and create those folders within that folder. For some, that helps keep the folder list a bit more organized. That’s just a personal preference, but it may help keep things organized.
You can create additional folders, depending upon your circumstances. If you work with clients, I’d suggest that you create a folder called “Clients” and then create subfolders for each of those clients beneath that one. This will give you a place to drop communication with clients that you need to maintain. You may want create a similar folder for “Vendors” or Banking, the list could go on. I do want to caution you that you can get carried away and actually create something that will hinder more than it helps. Let’s think; “Less is More!” I also want to remind you to process the message and delete it whenever possible. The vast majority of the email that we receive does not need to be kept. If there is really a reason to keep it, do so. If not, let’s be brutal and delete it.
Thanks and I’ll revisit this and continue from here, tomorrow.
Roger