‘Inbox’ and ‘Trash’ aren’t the only folders you need to use!

I am OCD. There. I personally feel (as others do) that it should be written as CDO so that it’s in alphabetical order, but I digress.

I’m OCD about a lot of things. I like my desk to be tidy. I like my files that I’m working on to be tidy. My house is, generally, tidy. I also like my email to be tidy. How on earth are you supposed to find something in all that mess when you don’t keep it organised?!

I understand that for a lot of people, they rely on search. However, I also know that searching for something doesn’t always work the way you intend. As an example, you have an email that was sent to you by Adam. Now you know Adam sent this email to you last week, so you decide to search for his name in your email. Problem is, Adam sends you *lots* of emails. So when you do your search for emails sent by Adam last week, you get a search return of about 100 emails. Awesome.

I like to keep mine organised and keep the fluff out of my inbox. There is stuff that I don’t *have* to read the minute that it comes in. Sadly, there is stuff that I get that I don’t have to read at all – I’m just on a mailing list that receives it. So, to make my life easier, I use folders – *other* folders. Things that I’ve created myself. I realise this may come as a shock to a few people, but as the title states…you can have more than just your ‘Inbox’ and ‘Trash’ folders. It *is* possible.

Filtering is your friend. Just because you think it’s important, doesn’t mean you need to read it as soon as it appears in your inbox. Filter it off. Put it into a “to be read at the end of the day” folder. I personally have folder for different types of emails – my monitoring email, division announcement emails, personal emails from work colleagues, calendar invites etc.

Doing this means that a) my inbox contains, at most, about 20 emails; and b) when I want to go looking for something, it’s incredibly easy to find. I don’t quite understand how more admins don’t use filtering and clear out their inboxes more regularly, but that may be because I’m slightly more “organisational-needy” than others.

Please, so that it makes it easier to find that email that I sent you 3 months ago regarding that incredibly important production system that we’ve been working on for nearly a year – filter and organise your email!

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