One reason why our inboxes are so out of control is because we use them as a to-do list, says Kyla Rozman, a professional organizer with In Order to Succeed in Vancouver.
An inbox should hold only new and unprocessed mail Rozman says. But we become so fearful of forgetting a project or a contact that our email account becomes an overflowing list of reminders.
As a result, we become unsure of which items we should be looking at first. Instead of focusing on high-priority items, we look at the newest messages, which might include important emails from clients or useless notices from retailers. Treating both types of messages equally slows down your productivity.
The solution is to create folders offline — that is, in a place other than in your online email system. These folders can reside under the “On My Computer” heading in your Outlook program, or in the cloud if you use a cloud-based storage service. The key is to keep these files outside the online email program.
These folders can help you develop a system that will make it easier to focus on emails that require your immediate attention. Here are three steps to maintaining an effective email system:
1. Categorize emails before opening them
Create two folders, to hold low-priority and high-priority messages. Your morning routine will be to sort all new emails into those two folders. Messages that are important to the running of your practice go into your high-priority folder.
Your low-priority folder will hold all the fun, yet distracting, items, such as personal emails, retail offers or newsletters from your favourite magazines.
In order to save time, don’t even open the emails at this stage, Rozman says. You should be able to tell from the subject heading whether the message is urgent.
2. Tackle emails in order of importance
Take care of your high-priority items in the morning. Once you’ve read or responded to those emails, you can move on to other important tasks. Leave your low-priority emails for after lunch. You can use this task as a break from more grueling duties.
3. Move important emails into proper folders
Allow your high- and low-priority folders to hold items only from that day. Once you’ve viewed those, you’ll know whether they should be deleted or sorted into a separate offline folder for storage.
There are some basic folder strategies that will help you maintain a streamlined email system. You will inevitably have folders for individual projects, although Rozman suggests not having more than 10 of these.
You can incorporate a “pending” folder for emails that require a response from others.
An “archive” folder will hold any note that is not connected to a current project but is still important. These can include memos from your firm that you would like to keep for future reference.
Another option is an “upcoming events” folder. This folder will store any emails about future seminars and conferences as well as details on travel plans for those events.
For the newsletters and links of interest you want to read when you’re less busy, create a “to read” folder, which will keep those items out of sight until you have more time to look them over.
This is the second instalment in a four-part series on organizing your email.
Next: Preventing email from becoming a distraction.