Handling email

In my newly organised world (!) I'm trying to find better ways of handling my inboxes and emails are one of those inboxes that can easily get out of hand. To combat this I'm trying a new strategy which aims to empty my inbox every day. I used to wait until my inbox had about 100 messages before I would go through them and weed out the stuff that didn't need to stay there. I do have a folder structure for archiving emails, but it was a bit hit and miss. So I'm trying a new approach.

If you're a PC user, and I still am, you may use either Outlook or Outlook Express to handle email. I used to use Outlook Express to do emails, keeping them separate from my diary and notes etc in Outlook. At the moment I'm trying Outlook. All I'd say is that the two programs are different. Outlook has some functions that I never knew existed, and probably a few I haven't found yet, Outlook Express seems to do things Outlook won't, or can't do. For example, I haven't found the button yet in Outlook that will auto-complete email addresses in the way Outlook Express does so. Perhaps my old 2000 version of Outlook doesn't do such things!

Anyway hopefully my new approach can be modified for either and adapted to other email handling programs.

The first thing I've done in Outlook is create some new folders, one for emails which are waiting for a response, one for emails which need my attention, and one for emails that I need to follow up in some way at a later date. It's early days and these categories may need to change. In Outlook, if you start the name of these folders with "@" they will appear directly below your inbox. You can do the same in Outlook Express, just highlight the inbox and click .

When I check my email, I put incoming mail into either the "attend to" or "follow up" folders. Anything left in my inbox that's not assigned to one of these folders is either filed in an archive folder (church, school, invoices etc.) or left to be moved to the delete folder at the end of the day.

The folder for emails that are waiting for a response from someone else is quite useful. In Outlook you can populate this folder using a simple rule. I picked up this tip from David Allen's website at davidco.com. Having created the folder, you then set up a rule which puts a copy of any outgoing mail with "wf" in the body of the text into the "@waiting for" folder. I then just have to remember to type "wf" after my name (some of you may have seen this beginning to appear in my emails) and Outlook takes of it. Sadly, Outlook Express does'nt have the same ability in it's rules, at least not that I could see.

All this got me looking for software that might help me organise my email and I came across something called ClearContext. I haven't downloaded it (there's a free personal edition) because I want to try my new system to see how that works and because I'm using Thinking Rock to organise tasks and the like and using Outlook to do the same would add confusion and complexity to my embryonic workflow system.

ClearContext allows you to create tasks from emails and categorise them and do a whole lot more. It looks quite interesting and if you're at a different organisational place you might want to give it a look.

Overall I have to say that's it's quite satisfying to open up my inbox at the start of the day and see it empty. It's also nice to know that I can click on a folder and see all the messages that are waiting for a response from someone or that I need to do something about in the next hour or day or whenever.