* E-mail clutter mailbag
Well, well, well. It seems I’m not the only person who lets her e-mail inbox get out of hand. Many readers wrote to tell me they are far worse than I when it comes to mismanaging an electronic mailbox. (Virginia! 3G bytes of stuff? Shame on you!)
Well, well, well. It seems I’m not the only person who lets her e-mail inbox get out of hand. Many readers wrote to tell me they are far worse than I when it comes to mismanaging an electronic mailbox. (Virginia! 3G bytes of stuff? Shame on you!)
And thank you to all the readers who offered suggestions on how to get the e-mail clutter under control. I am definitely going to give some of these methods a try. Let me share a few with everyone who regularly deals with a tide of e-mails.
Christopher at Georgetown University seems especially disciplined with his approach to managing messages. Among his tips are:
* Turn off the feature that automatically keeps outbound mail in a Sent folder. If you want to keep a copy of something, blind copy yourself and then file it right away.
* Be ruthless with the inbox. Only keep what you absolutely cannot deal with quickly. (Christopher admits to having 21 messages in his inbox and thinks that’s too many.)
* Use filters to automatically sort your mail. They won’t eliminate your mail, but they will make it easier to review what’s really important.
* Create a folder for personal items that come into your work account. Deal with these messages at home on your own time.
* Use subfolders and name them to indicate their function. For examples, use a subfolder for each project, or one for mail that comes from a specific person.
* At home, use multiple e-mail accounts. Set aside one address for your trusted correspondents to reduce the likelihood of spam. Use a disposable account for online activity that is likely to produce a lot of spam. Never use your work account for these purposes.
* Archive, archive, archive.
Marc from Indiana University suggests I configure Outlook to really remove “Deleted items” upon existing. This will at least keep the deleted items folder smaller. (Something tells me if I did this, I’d just use the “restore deleted items” option even more often than I already do.)
Marc also advocates a size limit on account space. At his place of work, users are allotted 100M bytes, and when they hit the limit, they must clean it up or risk getting no more e-mail. Hmm, I’m not quite sure if that’s a threat or a promise! I, too, have a size limit on one of my e-mail accounts. When I get that annoying message that I’m over my limit, I simply delete enough to get me by for the moment. I save the chore of more thoroughly cleaning out my mailbox for those really boring conference calls.
Another suggestion from Marc is to regularly archive messages. He has an interesting approach to archiving. “I open up an archive (.pst) file – which I keep somewhere in ‘My Documents’ and call it ‘Archives through TODAY’ – and I archive all of my e-mails into there which are older than some number of months. I have this folder ‘open’ in my Outlook client so, if I am looking for something old and forgotten, I can easily access it. Every year or so, I rename the file ‘Archives through yymmm.pst’ and start over.”
Shelly told me that a book changed her e-mail habits and her life. Seriously, she read the book and then started working for the company that produced the book, so I guess you’d call that being a real believer. Shelly says that the answers to my e-mail overload are to be found in “Take Back Your Life! Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized,” by Sally McGhee. I just got my copy of the book yesterday and I’ll be talking to Sally next week, so I’ll be sure to share some of the secrets that Shelly swears will make me a whole lot more productive and get me organized. Heaven knows I need it!
Linda Musthaler is vice president of Currid & Company.
