When a friend complained that her email provider had lost all of her messages going back to 1999, I was unsympathetic. “Why,” I asked, “would you be keeping email from 1999?”
If this had been my friend who can’t park in her garage because it’s stuffed with boxes, I wouldn’t have been surprised. But this was the exceptionally tidy and well-organized friend who plans her vacations on Excel spreadsheets.
Email appears to be a blind spot for many people who are otherwise well-organized. Their physical workspace is tidy, but their digital workspace looks like it belongs to a hoarder.
If you must keep information from an email, file it properly. You don’t need a separate set of folders in Outlook. You can save email messages in the same folders where you store other documents.
Productivity pro Laura Stack, one of our advisory board members, explains how to save Outlook messages in your existing file system here.
What’s your best tip for keeping a tidy inbox?
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Thanks for this great article. My favorite tip for keeping my inbox clean is to delete 10 old messages every time I don’t have any new ones. This gets harder the more you do it, but then you have to get more ruthless about dumping an old message.