How to Organize Your Email

Are You a Filer, Searcher or Tagger? Clearing Your Inbox in 3 Steps

Apr 20, 2007 Paul Read

Whatever your email program, emails have an disorganising influence These 3 steps will help you awake each morning to a clean and fresh Inbox.

Whether you use Outlook, Thunderbird, Apple´s Mail or one of the web based email clients such as Gmail, there is an neverending need to organise your in-box. For as soon as you clear it out, it refills by itself. It's like dog hair. It intentionally congregates in unwanted places, floating out from under the sofa just as you sit down with your TV dinner to catch the latest episode of Lost or Dr. Who. And it multiplies according to its own internal rules. If you receive just 25 emails a week, that´s 1300 in one year. If you receive 25, 50 or 100 a day, that's either 9,125 or 18,250 or 36,500 dog hairs to file, organise and sort out each year. Most email programs offer little advice other than wild searches or smart folders that unfortunately follow obscure and unhelpful rules.

Step1: Trash if you can

It may seem obvious, but the first and most important rule is to dispose of old emails. Just because Google´s Gmail offers 2.8 gig of storage per client should not be an excuse to save every piece of junk and newsletter you have ever been sent. Soon, even this space will fill, so perhaps the first habit to learn is to dispose of emails that you have read and no longer need.

The second obvious lesson is to adopt a method of organising your existing mail. There are a series of possibilities according to the sort of person you are:

Step2: What sort of organiser are you?

Filers are people who have never been able to drop the habit of creating another folder so that they will know exactly where everything is at any moment. Filers though do have limitations. As the number of emails increase so proportionately do the number of folders to file them in. This can lead to difficulties when a message is sought from a cousin abroad offering you work and you cannot remember if it was filed in family, friends, travel, or work opportunities. Filing takes time, not just to file, but also to retrieve.

Searchers are people that do not like to have to think about what they do with things. They were once filers and got fed up. So now they throw everything into a corner and cleverly use filters and search tools to drag them out when they are needed. Searchers can use a number of tools depending on their platform. Mac users have had Spotlight for some time and now can add Google Desktop to their choice. PC users have had Google for a while, amongst other 3rd party programs and now have Vista´s search facility. There is one drawback with Searching and that is you have to remember the name of what you are searching for. This is where tagging is so useful.

Taggers are people who like to classify, but not file. That is they dump in corners but label whilst they dump. Taggers have a great time in that by tagging an email with add-ons such as Mail tags and Tagcity means they can collect similarly tagged mail in fresh and changing forms. If you have used del.icio.us then you will have experienced some of the power of this system.

Step3: Divide by three

Whatever your character, one final approach is a variation of the 3 box solution as recommended by Getting Things Done (GTD) guru David Allen amongst others: Keep all mail in one folder called in-box. Everything else goes into either a folder called: To be Read and Dealt With - or Awaiting More Info. Pile it all in one of these three in-boxes at the end of each day and next morning you will hopefully find your sofa free of dog hair.

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