Is your email inbox so full you cannot find what you are looking for? My corporate Outlook account was, until just recently. Tribune Interactive's new Product Development Manager, Carlos Pero, recommended a paper he had read a few months prior about managing your email account. He mentioned it was on the 37 Signals weblog, so I did a quick archive search and found this article by Mark Hurst titled Managing Incoming Email: What Every User Needs To Know. I read through it and was able to clean up my inbox from over 1000 emails to just 2.
Where did all the email go? If an email was save worthy, I filed the email away in a folder by topic. I deleted anything I had left laying around that was not worth saving or archiving. I also went through and set every folder to Auto-Archive thus cleaning up the older mail and moving it to disk to help free up corporate mail server space. Upon doing so I feel liberated! I now handle emails on a day to day basis with an empty inbox everyday. This makes it easy to see when new mail comes in and allows me to act on the most recent emails more quickly without having to sift through my inbox.
For more helpful tips you might want to check out the Good Experience blog. I sign
ed
up for the newsletter and Mark Hurst emailed me within a day thanking
me for signing up which I thought was a nice touch. We exchanged a few
emails and I thanked him for his insightful paper on managing email. I highly recommend anyone that deals with email on a regular basis to read it.
