Organize Email And Increase Your Productiveness

To organize email can be a challenge for anyone. Email messages have taken the place of memos in business, correspondence in your personal life and direct mail marketing. There are newsletters, special announcements, business or private e-letters, promotions, updates and of course the terrible junk email. It is easy to open an email and think "I will answer this later this afternoon," and then go on to the next email. Of course the email doesn't get answered, and it is piling up.

When paper starts to stack up it nags at us to do something with it: Read it, throw it away or file it. Email doesn't have a physical presence, so the tendency is to let it stack up in our Outlook inbox.

Thus important business email can be forgotten. Dates can be missed and opportunities lost because the critical email gets lost in virtual stacks of the other emails. When you go to look for an email about the luncheon meeting this afternoon, it could have been unintentionally deleted, in the spam folder, or caught between two announcements of Junior's soccer game.

To organize email can be accomplished using the same methods of managing hard copy papers. Probably, you set up folders on your email client, such as Outlook. For instance, you could have Marketing, Personal, Newsletters, Family and Important – Needs Attention. This example is a simplification as there are probably 10 to 15 different categories for each of us that would make sense or even more. How many categories you need depends on your business, work and personal interests.

If you get a lot of email, say more than 40 (not counting junk mail) a day, work through the new email messages at set times, perhaps once in the morning and once around about an hour before you leave office for the day.

Respond to the email immediately upon reading if it's just a simple request or requires a simple reply, and then file it under the right folder. In business life a lot of email is just an update that does not require any action on your part so file that in the appropriate folder immediately as well.

If the email involves research before responding you can put it in the Important- Needs Attention folder. Right after you started work go through that folder and address the unanswered emails and then file in the correct folder.

Each week scan through all important folders and erase those emails that have been answered and do not require any further action. If you prefer you can move the email to a holding folder for 30 days and then delete.

There is another way to organize email messages fast and with ease. Email Sorter Wizard, an Outlook add-in, lets you sort through and organize your emails. Its comprehensive filing system can help manage Outlook inbox and folders. Everyone who is on the move, constantly receiving and sending emails will find the features in this addin highly advantageous.