At my last job, I received over 500 emails a day that all required organization, cataloging and a response from me. Each email was unique and I couldn’t setup any auto responses. I spent about 6 hours a day with Email when I first started and quickly organized to a point where I was only spending 3 hours a day on the task. This organization has helped me a lot to the point now where I spend 1 hour a day using Entourage for Mac or Outlook for Windows. I use Google Apps for all 3 of my businesses which makes IMAP very easy across my iPhone, Macintosh and PC and all three of the devices stay in sync. If you’re still using POP3, stop and switch to IMAP. It syncs folders and read / unread count across all of your clients and ensures you are always up to date no matter where you sign on to get your email. A perfect of example of how POP3 falls shorts is when you delete 50 SPAM messages from your Gmail account, your iPhone will still have those messages and won’t auto update. It’s really a big deal so use IMAP for pete’s sake.
The first step to organization is to stop using Webmail. If you’re using Yahoo!, Gmail or Live Mail just stop and switch to a desktop email client. Gmail is the most unorganized system and all of the stars, labels and unread counts won’t help you stay truly organized. There’s good news. If you switch to Apple Mail, Thunderbird, Outlook or Entourage, your “labels” will come with you and you’ll just have to configure some rules on the client side. Anyone that says they stay truly organized using Gmail has yet to show me how so until someone proves me wrong, I’m going to let you know that a dedicated mail client is the way to go. Another thing is, until Gmail announced an offline version of their system, there was no way to view existing email when you were away from a web connection. I can open up Outlook and view all 10 thousand items in my inbox and search them without an Internet connection. Gmail just recently gained that ability via a Google Labs plugin.
Let’s talk Email Subjects. I still get subjects that say, “Hi” or “our chat”. Until Apple’s Spotlight came along, organizing and searching emails like that was a real pain in the bum. I usually do a few common things in a header. I add a date to my header if I’m referencing a conversation I had with someone. Here are some examples of emails in my outbox with headers.
- Our Teens in Tech Conversation [1-30-09]
- Graphing Your Twitter Followers
- Twiistup 5 Flight Details[February 12th]
- New Version of Twhirl Released .8.8k
- iChat / iSight Bugs + Router Fix
- Yoono Widget Suggestion via Blog
- Recent Mentions of Justin.TV in Blogs
See how I was short, concise and dated some things that needed dates. Subjects are very important for a few reasons. When you’re sending a message to someone who has tons of email coming in on a daily basis, it’s best when they review their inbox that they can tell which items are important and which emails can be reviewed later. It’s also good because it improves search ability for later so you’re not stuck trying to find what email had those flight details to LA. The final benefit to subject organization is some common clients like Gmail and Mail.app for Mac have threaded conversations by subject. If every email you sent has the subject “hey” then Mail is going to have 4-5 months of messages in a single thread because they all have “hey” as the subject line. It’s confusing for you and the recipient.
A final tip that will help all heavy email users is that you need to have folders. Folders are excellent. Send BACN (Facebook, Myspace and Twitter messages) to always go to this folder and have banking info from your bank and paypal go to another folder. I have dozens of rules that help my inbox feel lighter and once a day I review BACN and mark it all as read and I completely ignore those AT&T Wireless & Capital One emails (joking). I haven’t seen a single GMail user that doesn’t have less than 100 unread messages and there’s no single way to just view unread messages in Gmail. I have “Inbox Zero” every day of the year which means not a single message is unread and they’ve all been responded to by the time I go to bed. It’s important to my stress level and organizational level plus it adds professionalism when you’re not letting important emails slip past you.
So that’s my quick bit on Email organization. I’ll post more soon.
I haven’t yet been able to find that perfect email organization success – but I have time to work on it I guess :)
I’d have to totally agree with the Imap and using desktop based clients. When I first got my windows phone I just quickly went to using POP3. But then after awhile I realized I was wasting so much time trying to fight between, Google’s web email for on the go. My pda and my Thunderbird client. When it came to deleting, sorting and keep everything synced, Imap saved the day. Though i can’t really think of a perfect way of organizing. The one thing I do is for the people or groups of people I email with the most I have to automatically go into their own folders/inbox, so not to have to look in my main inbox for everyone. And possibly using a search from time to time to really find that lost email. Also helps to not use your good email with sites you don’t trust, or use for forums. Just thought I’d add my thoughts and experience to this.