February Organizing Tip
Overwhelmed by your email inbox? Here are some ideas worth exploring:
- Can you remove the attachment but keep the e-mail? If so, file the attachment in the appropriate folder on your hard drive and file the e-mail in an appropriate folder only if it contains information that is valuable.
- Can you rename e-mails that have been sent to you? If so, rename any e-mail that has a subject line that doesn’t tell you something about the content of the e-mail.
- Can you set up filters? If so, consider filtering e-mails from certain sources into specific folders. You may already be doing this for spam. It can be done for other e-mail as well. For example, electronic newsletters can go directly to a Newsletter folder. You can read them during a low energy time. E-mails from a certain group you belong to can go into an X Group folder. Then you can go through them once a day.
- If you do not like (or don’t have time to read) the jokes or stories that people send you, ask them to remove you from their forwarding list.
- Only check and process e-mails at two or three designated times each day. Getting caught in the flurry of checking and responding to e-mail constantly during the day will not only create more e-mail but it will diminish your ability to effectively complete other tasks on your to-do list.
- If you have not checked your e-mail for several days, begin by deleting as many as possible and then read from the oldest to the most recent.
Any steps you can take to decrease the number of e-mails entering your inbox and to methodically process those that do, will reduce the “overwhelm” created from seeing a full inbox.
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