Tip of the Week: Get Organized

Imagine yourself with just one email waiting for you. It can be a reality with some simple structural changes.[/caption] Get ahead of your spring cleaning with one of the most basic — and yet most satisfying — tips you can possibly undertake. This one also happens to be one that could massively boost your effectiveness at work. That means it’s worth putting aside some time to put this little trick into action, no matter how busy your to-do list looks, because we promise that it’s going to pay itself back right away. And maybe even make you feel a little more sane! What’s this miracle organizational tip that we’re willing to share with you? It’s as simple as cleaning out your inbox by archiving old messages and creating filters, tags, and/or labels for all the rest. Whether you’re on Outlook, Gmail, or something else altogether, there are now simple ways to overhaul your inbox — yes, even retroactively — so that you’re sorted by project type, client, theme, or any other type of categories that make the most sense for your particular job and the way that your mind works.

Our Inbox-Cleaning Ideas

We’ve tried putting aside 30 minutes at a time to think about and begin sorting our inbox, but you might want to go all the way and give yourself an hour or two to do everything, because it’s pretty addictive! You should start by cleaning out your Spam and Trash folders, which simply clears up some space. If you have other Promotional folders and other ways to weeds out and delete your junk mail, you should search for that and get rid of it, too. Next, you could find everything labeled as a Newsletter and create a special place just for that (be careful with your parameters, though — you don’t want to hide emails with your co-workers about newsletters that you built for clients, you might just want to look for From or Subject lines with Newsletter involved — but this is why you’d give it some thought, first). This also goes for Sale, Discount, One Day Only, etc. You can pull all of the emails that you’ve received from accounts belonging to your family and put them into a Family folder, or Personal, then have all of their emails skip your Inbox and head into that Subfolder from then on, helping you keep your Work and Home headspaces separate. Another trick we love is searching by size, to weed out those old emails with huge attachments that you can either download and keep elsewhere, send to the Cloud, or delete. This will free up a lot of space for you, and maybe even speed things up! Those are just a few of our ideas, but you’re sure to have your own, especially the more you get into the habit and play around with your settings. The ROI for your time and energy on this process is going to make you a believer. Prepare to just stare at your empty Inbox and marvel. And hey, maybe if you’re feeling really ambitious you could also go for your desktop — literal or computer-based — next. But let’s not go overboard. After all, spring is a whole season long…and maybe we want to save something for next year?]]>

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