In this four-part web strategy series, we'll look at smart and easy ways to organize your digital life
Over the past couple of weeks we’ve looked at some of the areas in which we can corral and tame time-wasters in our electronic lives. Hopefully contacts and files are now being beaten into submission, and we can tackle the biggie: e-mail.
Whether it’s on a desktop, a laptop, or a mobile device, we’re besieged with messages ranging from trivial to mission critical. And like the other forms of e-chaos we’ve been examining over this series, they’re costing us precious time and money.
How much time exactly? Productivity expert Stever Robbins has created a handy calculator to help you see what the tangible and intangible costs can be. Because it’s not just wading through an overstuffed inbox that eats time, it’s getting back into the mental groove after interrupting other tasks to heed the siren call, “you’ve got mail.” Studies have shown these types of disruptions alone can cost us up to fifteen minutes each day.
Then there’s the problem of finding that elusive message containing a critical tidbit you need right now. If your mailbox resembles some of the dump bins foisted on women as handbags, you probably waste a lot of time scrabbling through the mess, searching. But there are ways to turn shambles into, if not order, at least something manageable, and buy back some of that wasted time for more productive uses (or even for a much-needed coffee break).
“The way people live now has changed,” said Amol Shah, Senior Product Manager, Office, at Microsoft Canada. “We’re always expected to be online.” He says he comes in to hundreds of messages each day that need to be evaluated and dealt with, and - no surprise - he relies in large part on the features of Microsoft Outlook.
However, organizing is only useful once you’ve filtered out the junk. Mr. Shah recommends adding and regularly updating a junk mail filter to your e-mail client, and message volume may plummet. But, he added, don’t forget to occasionally scan that filtered junk; the filters aren’t perfect, and may occasionally remove a message you want. Good filters allow you to always permit or ‘whitelist’ specific e-mail addresses that keep getting incorrectly flagged as spam, and to always block or ‘blacklist’ bad messages that sneak through the filter.
Carmi Levy, London, Ontario-based consultant and analyst, juggles multiple clients and projects, and has come up with his own system for maintaining order. “Simplicity needs to be your cardinal rule,” he says. “Long ago, I used to build elaborate, multi-level hierarchies of message storage folders. But then I realized I was spending way too much time cleaning out my inbox and figuring out where to store every last message and how to find them after the fact. These days, I keep things relatively flat: One level of message folders for major activities, with individual clients or projects underneath. This way, everything is visible, easy to find and easy to recall. And I no longer have to click through eight layers of message folders to find that long lost e-mail.”
Some of that mail may actually contain tasks you need to perform, or contacts you need to record, or meetings you need to attend. Clients such as Microsoft Outlook let you drag e-mails onto the appropriate applet and automatically generate calendar, contact or task items from those messages. However, that can be a challenge if everything isn’t together.
“A lot of people have multiple e-mail accounts, and have different ways of accessing them” notes Mr. Shah. “You should have one central place to access all e-mail. And combine calendars and contacts into one place; going in and out of different calendars and trying to sort out contacts wastes time.”
