I don’t know about you, but I really count on email as my main means of communication.  This is true at my work, and in my personal life as well.

I took a look at my email inbox, one of my in-boxes; I have quite a few, and I counted nearly 900 emails.  900 emails!  That’s a bunch.  Now this is not because I get 900 emails a day these days in any of my email accounts, but because I read email and get distracted and don’t do something with it. After a while, it piles up and becomes a problem.  About 11 years ago, at one of my previous jobs, I would get 800+ emails a day! I would spend about 2 hours through out the day dealing with them. I had a hard time keeping up at times. I think my inbox at one point had nearly 9000 emails just sitting in it, some of it important information, it was difficult to deal with at best.

Just recently I have tried to make the move to organize and deal with life as it comes in.  Not only email, but regular mail as well. I started with the paper mail first.  I used to grab the mail, put it on my desk and take a quick look at it.  After a while I wound up having a stack of mail that wound up being a mess, and important information was getting misplaced.  Here’s the solution I came up with: When I get mail, I sit down and take 10 minutes, open each one of them, determine if it’s junk or important.  I throw away all the junk, read any rare mail I get from family or friends, and sort the other important mail into file folders to be dealt with later.  It has improved how I handle the important things, helps me get rid of junk quickly, and I give attention right away to the personal mail.

It’s funny, that’s pretty much the way I had done it in the past, and it worked out great. I think most people do the same thing. But these days with more information streaming to you from all angles, and all sorts of distractions, it’s hard to stay on track.

It is the same, but with much much higher volume for email. I am taking the tried and true procedure for paper mail and applying to email.  But with email I am able to get my mail program to do more of the work for me!

I’m going to use Outlook as my example here but online email from companies like Google, Yahoo and Hot mail, as well as other email clients like Thunderbird do give you the same functionality that I am going to expand on.

In Outlook your email is managed using folders. Folders are a convenient way to store email.  The basic folders that come with an Outlook email account are; Inbox, Sent Items, Junk E-Mail, Trash, Drafts…  So, if you are looking for new email, you check your Inbox. If you want to see a copy of the email you sent someone, check Sent Items. And if you accidentally deleted or threw away an email you can go look for it in the Trash (unless you have told Outlook to empty your Trash, at that point it’s just gone).

So, here’s a way that I have helped myself to plow through all of the email that comes in.  Outlook allows you to set up what are called Rules and Alerts. It’s under the ‘Tools’ menu in the Outlook menu bar. And it is a powerful assistant you should take advantage of if you haven’t already.

Ok, let’s say you have email coming in from different sources, sources that you want to kind of keep the emails separate. Let’s say you have email alerts coming from your bank. Those are important, and normally it’s good to keep them all together somewhere.  You can make a folder in your Mail account just for those emails.

Step 1 is to create a folder. You can do this a couple of different ways, but my favorite is to right click on the name of the mailbox you want to create a folder for in the mail folders section of the screen. Once you right click on it, you get a context specific menu. What that means is that the menu that pops up is specific to the item you right clicked on. In this case look for the item ‘New Folder’. Click it. Give the new Folder a name, say something like “Bank alerts”, and click OK.  By default the folder will be created directly under the Mailbox. If for some reason you want to created the folder under an existing folder you can choose where to create it before you click OK.  Or, you can click and drag it to the folder you want it to live under. Your choice… play around with it… you can’t break it, just mess it up; and that’s something that can be fixed easily.

Ok, so you have your new folder. Now you want Outlook to AUTOMATICALLY put emails from your bank into that folder once it gets the email, every time it does a send and receive. That’s where you go to the Rules and Alerts item under the tool menu.

This is the simplest to set up. First you need to have the email address or part of the name of the email address that is sending you the email. For example if your bank is ‘Bank of America’, you could use the email address alerts@bofa.com or, you could use a portion of the email like ‘bofa’. 

1. Open up the Rules and alerts wizard.
2. Select a template from the “Stay Organized” section; Move messages from someone to a folder.
3. Under step 2 of the wizard, click on ‘people or distribution list’
4. In this dialog, enter the whole email address of the sender, or choose one from the list of displayed email addresses, click from and then click OK when you are done.
5. Click on the ‘specified’ folder link, just under the link you clicked for our step 3.
6. Now you can choose the folder where you want to put these emails, select ‘Bank Alerts’ folder, click OK. Or if you haven’t already made a folder, you can do it from here by clicking on the New.. button.
7. You will see your selections have updated the information in step 2 of the wizard.
8. You can now click the Finished button, or click next to do more with your rule.. There are a lot more options you can choose from.

If you wanted to select the incoming email to send to the folder from a portion of the sending email address, you would have selected “Start from a blank rule”, rather than a “Stay Organized template.” And you would have chosen a condition, entered in the data (the portion of the sending email address), and told it where to file the email.

Just doing this one little thing in your email program can help you sort through the emails that you get on a daily basis. This is aside from doing the junk mail rules to keep the unwanted offers, spam and phishing emails from becoming a problem, but that is a completely different blog post…