Organising My Emails

I’ve posted recently about wanting to get myself organised and about making some headway but the truth is I still have a LONG way to go. I guess its a never ending task because its not something I am just going to find a solution to and Voila - I am organised. What method or “system” I chose for keeping things under control its going to take a lot of maintenance and discipline to actually stick to the routine I come up with.

The one area I have made some headway with is my email. As I mentioned before I have been looking at some online tools and applying some good tips to my email to try and keep me on top of things.

I don’t know about you, but my email inbox drives me crazy. I would switch the computer on in the morning and receive 20 or so emails, of which maybe 1 or 2 were actually personally sent to me. I’m not talking about spam, which goes into the Junk Email box, but about bac’n as the cool kids are calling it apparently - all the messages you do want, that you actually asked to be sent, but not things you want to or need to look at straight away. I’m talking bank statements, bills, newsletters and catalogues. You signed up for them, but you don’t want them clogging up your inbox, because it makes it harder to find the real emails in there, and I find the process of opening email and seeing 20, 30, 40 new emails a day, stressful and depressing.

I’ve read quite a few articles lately about de-cluttering your inbox, all with some great tips, so I’ve been applying those to my email.

Top 10 Email Productivity Boosters
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I use both Microsoft Outlook and Gmail for my email, Outlook being my main email manager. My Gmail account is for blog-related email which I like to keep separate from the rest. I’ve applied quite a few of the tips from those articles to both Outlook and Gmail and these are steps that have worked for me:

Rules and Filters

Applying rules (Outlook) or filters (Gmail) to automatically label or move email when it arrives, so you can quickly see what type of email has come in and decide whether to deal with it is a great way to organise your messages.

These work slightly differently in the 2 different programs because Outlook is folder based and Gmail is label based. I’ve only recently started using Gmail and it takes a bit of getting used after a long time using Outlook and being very comfortable with Microsoft products. I’m still undecided as to which email handling method I like best.

When you apply a rule in Outlook, you can specify what criteria you want it to check when emails arrive and what to do with emails that satisfy the criteria. My rules are set up to be moved into different folders depending on what they relate to. I like to use levels of folders and subfolders too, to keep things as organised as I can. The rule criteria are pretty flexible allowing lots of different ways to sort your email. Examples of a couple of my rules are:

• All emails sent to a specified email address are moved to a separate folder
• All emails sent from a particular email address, or from an address with specified words in it are moved to a separate folder. This is useful if you regularly receive email from a particular organisation/website but its from several different addresses.
• All emails with the words “FW:” in the subject line are moved to a folder marked “Forwards”. This is to collect all those jokes, thoughts for the day, this-child-will-die-unless-you-send-it-on-to-everyone-you-know type email. But I didn’t want FW emails from my husband or my parents put in this folder because they often forward legitimate stuff to me, so I put an exception on the rule to not move forwards from those people.

To apply a rule in Outlook, click on Rules and Alerts in the Tools Menu, or click on an email with the criteria for your new rule, right click and choose create rule. A wizard will guide you through the steps for creating a new rule.

Filters in Gmail have a similar purpose in that they identify messages with certain criteria and then apply an action to them based on that criteria. the big difference is that Gmail uses labels instead of folders and relies heavily on archiving. I’d never really archived messages before because I always thought it was like sending them down to the deep dark basement where it would be difficult to retrieve them from, but in reality its just moving them out of your inbox. The filters I have applied are similar to those in Outlook - but instead of moving them to folders, I apply a label to them and move them into the archives. Examples:

• Messages from Entrecard telling me someone wants to advertise on my blog are moved to archives and labelled Entrecard.
• All emails with the words “Please moderate” in the subject line are labelled “Moderation” and moved to archives
• All emails with the words “MyBlogLog” or “BlogCatalog are moved to archives, labelled “BlogLog” and marked as read. I know I don’t need to read this any time soon, but I don’t want to delete them altogether. Does anyone else get sick of all those people who add every single person they find as a friend?

To apply a filter in Gmail click on the “Create a Filter” link near the search box or on “Filter messages link this” from the drop down box within a message - under “Reply”.

You will find the labels you have created listed on the left under the “Chat” box. Labels with unread messages will be bolded and have the number next to them.

Once I had organised my emails in Outlook and Gmail I was left with something I hadn’t seen in ages - an inbox that only had emails addressed to me! It made me loved again (and a lot less stressed!).

Not only that, but the folders and labels I created made it a lot easier to complete the next steps

Unsubscribe

I was getting newsletters from so many different places, all of which I had signed up for at one point in time, but most of which I never read and never got around to deleting.

My rules and filters showed me exactly which newsletters I was receiving and made it much easier to decide which ones to unsubscribe to. I got rid of quite a lot of them, but there were still a few I wanted to keep. I like having them organised into their own folder, rather than in the inbox - I know they’re there to look at when I get a chance, but there not taunting me in the inbox and cluttering it up.

I have found unsubscribing to be a bit problematic at times - you know when sometimes it seems like you have to go through 10 steps just to get your name taken off the list! I subscribed to a newspaper newsletter a few months, so not a dodgy corporation, and they send me 4 emails a day on news, entertainment, sport and business!!! I pretty quickly realised I didn’t want to get all those emails and would rather just check the website, but do you think I can unsubscribe? No matter how many times I have gone through the steps (and been told I am unsubscribed) I still get the email! Now I’ve marked them as spam because they drive me crazy, but for an ordinary newsletter, I would move it/label it as “Newsletter” and look at it when I get the chance.

Delete

All the moving and labelling an unsubscribing so far hasn’t actually reduced the number of emails, its just taken lots of them out of the inbox, but having done the above 2 steps, the deleting task is so much easier. For a start everything’s organised so its easy to go straight to all the “Please moderate comment” emails or the Target catalogues for the last 2 years and delete them in one go.

You could do this using the search function which works well in Outlook and Gmail but having set up your folders/labels its automatically done for all existing emails and all those to come.

I am so bad at deleting emails from my inbox, but this is the most liberating part! I don’t know why I feel the need to keep all those personal emails I think in the back of my head I’m thinking what if I need that email later? even if I’ve already replied to it! What if my blog crashes and I want to restore all the comments? I should keep the emails! The reality is I do regular backups, so I really don’t need to keep those emails and they are just clogging everything up.

Some of them I do want to keep - like the sign-up emails with your log-in details or the email from my husband’s friend who just had a baby and who we won’t see for months by which time I have forgotten the kid’s name! I also created a “saved” folder/label that I move these to so I can always refer back to them.

After that, I just need to be ruthless! Because there’s no better feeling than seeing this:

Of course, it doesn’t last long, but at least I now feel more on top of my emails and they don’t create me as much stress.

The next thing I have to work on is being more time efficient when checking emails which ties in with feeling more organised with all the things I need to do during the day, not just on the computer. I fall into the trap of having email open all the time, checking it regularly and stopping what I’m doing to look at the email that just announced it’s arrival with a ding.

The things I want to work on:

• Only checking my emails a few times a day and having outlook or gmail closed when I’m not checking them
• Not reading emails until I have the time to respond to them properly - or marking them to follow up in a way that I won’t forget about them
• Replying to emails straight away (subject to the above). If I can deal with it quickly - just do it, rather than file it away for later, forget about it, and spend twice as long dealing with it than I should

Since my “organisation quest” is going to be an ongoing thing, I think this will become a series of posts for me. Maybe some of the things I do will work for you, or I’ll find some tools that you might find interesting. At the very least I’ll keep track of what I’ve done so I can refer back to it later when I need some inspiration!

I’d love to hear what you are doing to get/keep organised. All tips are gratefully received!