Digital Organizing: Filtering Email
There was a time not too awfully long ago (a couple of years I guess.) that I was guilty of the “Overstuffed Inbox” syndrome. When I started my email program it would actually take longer to get going because I had over 3,000 messages in my inbox folder!
Oh, I didn’t just leave absolutely everything there, at the time I had over 30 email folders for different things and I even had filters set up to automatically file a lot of it away in the appropriate folder. The downfall came when I got lazy about keeping my filters up to date.
The painful answer of course was to take an afternoon (several actually) and go through everything in the inbox and delete stuff that was no longer needed and create folders and filters to deal with the stuff I wanted to keep.
When I was finally done I had over 60 folders, a bunch of new filter rules, and an *empty* inbox. It was worth the effort to organize things because it made a lot of stuff easier to find by getting rid of unneeded stuff and sorting out what was left. Now my inbox has grown back to 47 messages and I’m overdue for dealing with that but I’m NOT going to let it get over a hundred this time.
Technorati Tags: email, organizing, sorting, filters, email+filters, email+folders
It’s always a problem for me with office emails, but less of a problem with the private ones, as normally I delete emails immediately after reading for the latter ones, but I couldnt do it for office emails since it’s important to keep records.
However, I try to make my inbox empty by moving the emails to folders after reading them. aroengbinang.
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