Managing e-mails

Talking about calendars, here’s a tip for managing e-mails that’s all about circles. You create 5 folders that you keep renaming and reusing. Each folder has a week’s full of e-mails that you’ve dealt with but you might want to go back to.

The best way to describe it is by example. So, last week started with Monday, May 19, 2008 – Victoria Day in Canada. The folder would be titled

Arr 08/05/19 del 08/06/23

Arr stands for “Arriving during the week of” and del stands for “delete the contents of this folder on this date (or if this is for home use on the Sunday of this week) and rename the folder.”

A set of 5 would be like this:

Arr 08/04/21 del 08/05/25
Arr 08/04/28 del 08/06/02
Arr 08/05/05 del 08/06/09
Arr 08/05/12 del 08/06/16
Arr 08/05/19 del 08/06/23

When you empty the 5-week old e-mails from the top folder each Monday, you rename it starting the “Arr” with the Monday date (you’re never more than one or two digits out with the date) and then using the number of the date for the Friday of that week, but the number of the month ahead.

As I said, it’s easier if you just mimic the protocol in the folder examples I’ve given. Have fun with it, and keep your e-mails sorted till you dump them, quite content that you haven’t thrown away anything you might need and yet not cluttering up your e-mail forever.

Of course, if you’re using gmail, it doesn’t matter, because there you can archive everything and they give you the space of several football fields to save your e-mails. I wonder what they do with them?

Wrasma Marketing technical advisor