Last week I talked about some of the Project Management systems available for you to keep your web design projects and clients organized and happy. This week, I’m going to focus on a very unpleasant task that most of us avoid at all costs. I’ve been putting it off for nearly a year, but an upcoming email server migration has caused me to have to face and deal with it head-on. Organizing that pesky email inbox.

In my case, there were 5800 or so unread messages languishing there since I had been keeping my email on the server for web-based access for nearly a year. I’d only pull them down into Outlook to shrink the email folder’s file size.

I’m going to assume you use Microsoft Outlook as your email client for purposes of my discussion, but most of these tips and tricks will work no matter what you are using.

Email Folders

You should set up folders beneath your Inbox folder to sort your mail. Ideally, it should mimic the folders you have on your computer hard drive as far as sorting personal and client-related items. This also makes it easy to write Rules for automatically sorting incoming email.

Append a symbol such as # or * or + to a folder’s name to move it straight to the top of the list.

For my web design business, I have a Clients folder and beneath that I have Active and Archived. Within each of those, I have my client folders, sorted alpha by last name or business name.

I have a Reading folder where I stash all the marketing and web development emails I get on a daily basis. I also have an +Action folder where urgent email goes that must be responded to before the day’s over. This could be a request or question from a client or a follow up on a new lead, a proposal that needs to be delivered, etc.

Archive Your Email

As projects are completed, the client folders or subfolders are moved to the Archive folder. I also run Archive on Outlook to archive completely away from my *.pst file anything older than, say, two years. You can configure it to suit yourself, but I find two years is a pretty good threshold for archiving client items. You can always retrieve and load the archive.pst file when you need to find archived items.

Writing Rules for Incoming Email and to Help Speed the Weeding Out Process

You can write Rules on the fly for each message that will tell Outlook how you want it to process mail from a particular person or with a particular keyword in the subject or message body. This speeds up the process of dealing with existing inbox clutter. It also helps in processing newly arrived mail.

I go a step further. For my home based business, I have Outlook play a sound if I get an email from my web design partner or from certain clients I’m currently working with. I used sound as a cue when I worked day staff at the law office as well. So that I wouldn’t be distracted, I made sure that Outlook played two distinctive sounds, one for each of my assignments. When I heard that sound, I knew I should stop what I was doing and check my email. Otherwise, I let it go until I had time to deal with it.

Categories

Outlook has a powerful, but little-used feature called Categories. Categorizing your email helps you to retrieve it later. I like to use categories to help me find code snippets and other useful information essential to my web development business. I belong to several web development mailing lists and they often have great links and code snippets right there handy. Using categories (which essentially act like tags), I can have my cake and eat it too!

I have one Rule that sends the list item to its appropriate mailing list subfolder under my Reading folder. So that I can keep each list’s items in their own folder, I further break them down by assigning categories to list/email items that contain useful information I might want later. Such categories include WordPress, CMS-MS, PHP, CSS, HTML, eCart, Photo Galleries, etc. You can search your email items by category so if you’re looking for some PHP code that you remember saving, and you have PHP as a category, you can simply ask Outlook to find all your email items in the category PHP. How cool is that?

Know When To Hold ‘Em, When to Fold ‘Em and When to Throw ‘Em Away

The biggest dilemma for me is deleting email. I have a Reading folder, as I mentioned. When I began the cleanup process a few weeks ago, there were hundreds of unread items in the various subfolders. Items I hadn’t had time to read and which were by this time nearly a year old. I made the decision to just blanket delete them.

A lot of web development information becomes stale within months or at least within a few years. And I simply hadn’t had time to read any of those items in a year. When dealing with existing inbox clutter, be ruthless. Just like with your clothes closet, if you haven’t worn it in a year, donate it or sell it. If you haven’t needed that email “resource” in over a year you can archive it or delete it. This brings me to my next point.

Your Daily Inbox Routine

In order to keep that inbox tamed, you MUST deal with it on a daily basis. Sitting back and letting Outlook plop your email into various folders doesn’t do any good if you aren’t going to (eventually) read or deal with that email. Train yourself, as I’ve had to do, to set aside a block of time each day (I usually do this about midmorning, right before lunch) to deal with all your inbox items. Read and flag/categorize your “Reading” items. Send email that requires an immediate response to your Action folder. Once it’s been dealt with, file it away in its appropriate folder.

And just like dealing with physical paper clutter, handle each inbox item ONCE! And use the Four D’s rule: Do It, Delete It, Defer It or Delegate It.

So… What are you waiting for? Roll up your sleeves, dive in and conquer that bloated Inbox!

Other Resources

• 30 Seconds to an Empty Inbox (Life Clever)
• How to Organize Your Inbox (Fred Brunel)
• Mastering Email Overload (Idea Marketers)
• Transform Your Inbox from Stressful to Useful (Simple Mom) (And lookey here {{taps Chris Pearson on shoulder}}, Simple Mom’s running on Thesis!)
• 10 Tips for Organizing Your Email (Web Worker Daily)
• Seven Ways to Organize Your Email (Microsoft at Work)
• Organizing Email (ParticleTree)
• Organizing Email (Smead Organomics)
• Organize Your Email (Monster Blog)
• Clearing Your Inbox in Three Steps (Suite 101)