3 Simple Tips for Highly Effective eMail Organization

3 Simple Tips for Highly Effective Email Organization

In this day and age, we tend to let our emails control us instead of us controlling our emails.
Here are 3 tips to help you get your email back under control.
1. Folders – folders allow us to organize our email for easy finding. My Inbox is broken down into the following categories:
• Doing – In this category are all my client folders.
• Growing – this is where I store marketing material and continuing education. The most important folder I have here is for all my newsletters. This way I can go in when I have a few minutes and catch up on reading.
• Needs Action – I have this broken down into 7 days of the week. Emails needing action are dragged into the appropriate day for me to work on.
2. Create Rules – the day I learned this trick was the day I saved so much time sorting emails! Creating rules directs Outlook to sort your email for you. Almost everything I receive is set up on a rule to go into a folder. There are two ways to create a rule:
• Right click on the email. Scroll down and click Create Rule. There are several ways you can choose to create the rule. Select the one that works best for your email. Click ok. I always check the next box to run the rule on all the email in my inbox. It will automatically sort into the designated folder.
• The second way to create a rule is to click Tools on the Taskbar. Select Rules and Alerts. This brings up the manage rules box. Here you can create rules, delete rules, move to new folders etc.
3. Timers – Contrary to popular belief, you do NOT have to have your email running continuously. I have mine set to run every 20 minutes because my business is highly email based. If yours is not so much focused on business, you can set your timer to run with longer intervals, or turn it off completely and manually run your email during your set email time. Many people find it best to run email in the morning, around noon and then in the evening. If you are not constantly distracted by email you are much more productive! To change your timer:
• Click Tools and then Options. Click the second tab that says Mail Setup
• Under Mail Setup, click the box that says Send/Receive.
• Go to Settings for group “All Accounts”
• The second box is the one to change your timer. Either set it for the time interval you want, or uncheck it to manually run your email yourself.