How Many Emails are in Your Inbox?
How I feel each day is directly related to the amount of email in my inbox. A perfect day ends in an empty inbox. For me, Eudora works great. It’s strictly an email client, I use ‘it’ for email and Outlook for contacts, calendar, etc.
I have a lot of folders set up in Eudora to organize my email. Each client has a minimum of two folders - Misc. and Completed. I set up a filter so if a client sends me an email it goes directly into their Misc folder. When an email arrives each folder in Eudora opens its own tab.
Why is this so important to me? Having the tab open tells me that I have a task to complete for that particular client. Once the task is completed I move the email to the Completed folder and close the Misc tab. This not only keeps me on track, but keeps my Inbox empty.
When reading my friend Stacy’s blog this morning (which prompted this post), I was reminded that not all people work the same way as I do. She has a completely different way of handling her emails. Read how she tamed her Inbox.
I hope one of these solutions will help you when tackling your email overload.
I’m a huge fan of Gmail for organizing email. I like that for the vast majority of email I can just stick it in a folder with a filter and then process it when time allows, but for clients I can do an extra step. I can file the email in their folder, but also leave it in the inbox at the same time. So important emails are in the inbox until completed, then they are archived with a single click and are already sorted into the clients folder.
For certain clients that are priorities, I can also flag the email with a star, that way I know what the hotest email i need to handle is.
And no email application I’ve ever tried searches email like Gmail does. Search is awesome.
I like Gmail so much I use Google Apps to read my “real” email inboxes in the Gmail tool.