What do you do with your email after you read it? Do you delete it or do you keep it? If you keep your email, where do you keep it?
One place to keep your email is in your inbox. Then you can always refer to your old email whenever you need to.
Keeping your email in your inbox is one option, but then you have an increasingly growing collection of email that can be hard to search. Think of it like a pile of papers on your physical desktop in the real world. As you get more and more email the pile grows larger and larger and soon becomes unmanageable. To find one email you have to scan through an ever increasing list of emails so it takes longer and longer to find the email you want.
Some modern email programs do have a search box. You can type a keyword into this search box to filter your list of emails to show only emails matching your search terms. This can help you to find a specific email, but then you must know exactly which keyword to type to find that specific email. If you have a lot of emails in your inbox your search keyword may still yield several emails and then you will still have to scan through all of those emails to find the one you want.
I suggest that you can do better by organizing your email into folders. I use Microsoft Outlook to manage my email and Outlook lets me create email folders. I then move email out of my inbox and sent mail folders and into the email folders I create. I refer to my email folders as my email history.
My email history consists of several root folders and within each root folder I have subfolders. For example, as a Toastmasters club officer I send and receive emails when conducting club business. In my email program I have a root folder called Toastmasters. Underneath my Toastmasters root folder I have several subfolders:
- Meeting Minutes
- Meetings
- Members
- Success Plan
- Training
The folders shown above are just some of the subfolders I have in my Toastmasters root folder. Some of these folders are further broken down into additional subfolders. For example, the Meetings folder has one subfolder for each meeting date and all emails pertaining to a specific meeting get stored in that meeting’s subfolder in my email history.
So why do I have these email history folders? The reason is that it makes it much easier for me to locate an old email when I need to find it. I can quickly navigate to the email folder that contains the email I want to locate. For example, if I want to find an email that refers to a specific club meeting I would navigate to my Toastmasters folder, then to the Meetings subfolder within the Toastmasters folder, and then to the meeting date subfolder underneath the Meetings subfolder. Once in that subfolder I would see only emails for that meeting instead of all of the emails I have sent and received. If instead I left all my email in my inbox I would have to sift through hundreds of emails to find the one I want. With the email folder system I see only a few emails in a folder pertaining to the item I am looking for.
While I do move most of my email into my email history folders, I still keep a few emails in my inbox. These are emails that still need some follow up. They are emails that I have not replied to yet or emails that I have not read yet. I also keep emails in my inbox if I want to read them again when I have more time to process them more carefully. I will also keep an email in my inbox to serve as a reminder of something I need to follow up on. My inbox then becomes like a task list where I can review emails that require some follow up from me.
What about emails that you send? These all end up in your sent mail folder. Your sent mail folder can grow in size over time, so I also recommend taking emails out of your sent mail folder and adding them to your email history folders. This way you will keep all of the emails you send and all of the emails you receive in a well organized filing system.
In addition to moving sent emails into my email history folders, I will sometimes move a sent email into my inbox instead of my email history. My reason for doing this is that it gives me a reminder that I sent an email and that I am waiting for someone to reply to that email. Keeping it in my inbox instead of my sent mail folder gives me one place to look for a reminder about emails that require follow up. In the case of a sent email, the follow up would be to contact the person again if I have not received a reply in a timely manner.
Conclusion
In conclusion, I strongly encourage you to adopt a system of email history folders for storing the email you receive as well as the email you send. This will make it easier for you to find an email when you need to look back at an email you have received or sent. Modern email programs do have search features that let you search your emails by typing keywords, but I still think it is worth organizing your email history into folders. Think if of it like a virtual file cabinet. In a physical file cabinet you store files in folders so you can easily find them later. You can do so electronically with email by creating folders for your email. Then you can easily navigate your email folder system to find the email you are looking for.