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Email Organization
Habakkuk | Apr 23 2007
So, I am a late-comer to GTD and all of its ideas on efficient processing and I have an area that is driving me nuts: email organization. I have been with my present firm for 13 years and have a plethora of folders and subfolders for my different clients and the correspondence with them. This leads to the obvious issue of filing emails when they come in. GTD has made me realize that a good deal of these emails don't really need to be kept: the "thanks for that" emails that are clogging the system, the request and answering email for a simple piece of data that is no longer relevant, etc. Basically I have a large amount of sorting and deleting ahead of me to trim the system to what is actually needed and what is not. My big question is how to organize them after the fact. I have read the Acton/Archive/Hold folder system which intrigues me for its simplicity, but am not sure if anyone else is using that after having had an established system for filing that now seems cumbersome. What is the transition like from files to searches for organizing data? And more to the point - and this is the big one for me - would it be better to just continue with the present system than to reorg my entire system? I am afraid of falling into the trap of working on the system rather than working on the work and thereby becoming less effective trying to be effective. Questions? Comments? Rebuttle? 3 Comments
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 How do you think about...Submitted by brownstudy on April 24, 2007 - 12:52pm.
How do you think about your emails when you're asked to find something--By correspondent? Date? How's the full-text searching capability of your mail client? If full-text search is good enough, then do you need to break it down further? You could just declare your current filing system as "old" and start tomorrow with a totally new system of Hold/Action/Archive folders. Try it for a week and see how it works for you. I am cursed with Lotus Notes so I depend on folders to cluster like mails together, and have a brute force search of all documents to resort if all else fails. I do tend to create 'temp' folders for specific projects for clients. Then I delete all the superfluous emails I don't need, and move them to the parent client folder. That way I at least know all relevant mails are in one folder. » POSTED IN:
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