Who doesn't battle with the influx of email they receive during the day?  At any given time I probably receive 30 or more emails a day and that is being very ____________.  Some of you receive over 100 emails a day.  I want to share with you my recommendation for handling email organization.

Now you may not want to take all of these tips, yet you may want to make a combination or subset of these tips.  I encourage you to think outside the box though and compare each to the way you receive and process information.

Now without further ado, lets jump right in.

Drawing A Line In The Sand

The first thing you want to do is draw a line in the sand.  Now the reason I want you to take this step is because you more than likely won't finish this project today.  It will take you some time to establish your process and to sort through the clutter that is in your inbox.  I recommend allotting a small amount of time each day to accomplishing this task so you don't get burned out.  You may even consider assigning the job out to an assistant, if you have one.

Either way, this will give you a clear identifier regarding where you started this process and where you have to go.  Now there are many ways to handle this process and it will depend on your personal work flow and also how many emails you have in your inbox as to which route you want to take.  I will detail them below:

Option A:  Create a subfolder under your inbox and move everything older than today or this week to this folder.  You can title this Old Emails or Emails prior to [date].  Now, obviously if you have 10,000 or more emails you may not want to go with this option.  It may take a long time to move the items over.

Option B:  Create subfolders under your inbox by year.  This option is for those who have an over abundance of emails (10,000 or more). It is similar to A but you just need more subsets of the email groupings so you can work on them in batches.  Often times I find people work on things in batches, so if you were working on a project it was probably during X time and you can easily find all the corresponding emails.

<strong>Begin the Sorting Process</strong>

Now the next step is to begin the sorting process.  Depending on your email system you may be able to search and destroy.  The easiest way to do this is to search by domain (@adt.com) or by the sender's address.  Once all items are grouped together you can determine if it should be deleted or moved into a subfolder or archived into a document management system.

Option A:  Move to a subfolder based on sender - I often use this option if I have subscribed to a newsletter and it comes from the individual or a specific company.  So, I have folders for all my vendors so I can keep all of them in one place.  When I am looking for announcements or information from that vendor I can just access their one folder.

Option B:  Move to a subfolder based on project - I use this for when I am working with a person or group of people on a specific project and there are a number of different emails that would have been sent/receive regarding the one topic/project.  This is very helpful for documentation and prosperity purposes.  You use the emails to ensure you have documented all of the decisions and actions on a particular matter.  Once the project is over you either archive or delete the folder and all subsequent emails.

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