A Saved Email Is Only Helpful If You Can Find It
by Christa
A Red Bench Owners, Christa and Angela
We recently had fantastic A Red Bench teleclass called Detox Your Inboxand it was about using email effectively. One of the questions was whether our expert, fellow organizer Lauren Halagarda, recommends using email folders for archiving. Now with all of our teleclasses you have to take the expert’s advise as just that – advice. You can take it or leave it, but do give it some thought. You have to listen to the teleclass to understand the entire context of her recommendation, but interestingly enough Lauren does not recommend archiving your emails using folders.
She says “saving email is only helpful if you can find the email and the folders become overwhelming and confusing.” Lauren recommends after processing your email, and she provides a process to do so on the teleclass, to archive emails in one folder. Then use search software to retrieve information quickly. She reviewed various search software tools on the call including her preferred software recommendation.
Now, I know for many of you this may be a big change and seem like and odd recommendation. I know for myself, I do like having a personal folder, a folder for my organizing company and one for A Red Bench. I can still use the search tool she recommends making retrieval easy. But as I was listening to her I started thinking about a client who is an attorney and has to save every client communication. Having one folder will help her tremendously because right now she cannot stay on top of archiving them and the volume does not allow her to find anything. Moving the emails into one folder and then using a search tool to find what she needs,when and if she needs it. This is a perfect solution for her; it’s simple and something she can maintain long term.
To purchase Detox Your Inbox, visit the Audio Recordingspage of our website and consider some of our other organizing related teleclasses called Time Management is Broken or Organizing For Your Brain Type.
Tags: A Red Bench, Christa Patchen, Christa Patchen Wagner, Christa Wagner, email abuse, email overload, Email tips, Managing Email
July 24th, 2009 at 7:04 am
Hi Christa,
I agree with you about advice- it’s up to you to make the final determination about what will work for you!
I also agree with the old adage that ‘if it ain’t broke don’t fix it’. So, if your folders are working for you, then by all means don’t change it. However, when you can’t find what you need and are spending too much time sorting, organizing and searching for things- it’s time to update your system!
BTW- Glad you were able to apply the system to a client situation. I do think it would work very well for the client you mentioned.
Thanks for having me at ‘A Red Bench’!
Lauren