Use a Five-Folder System to Finally Organize Your Mailbox
We’ve come a long way from the simple ” trio of trustees ” method of organizing our inbox, and for many of us, our email is as disorganized as ever. To fend off the tide, this five-folder system gives you a little more flexibility to clean up, while still keeping everything you need in just one click.
Fast Company describes the entire system from the link below, but here are the five folders in question:
- Inbox: Inbox is a pen. Emails shouldn’t stay here longer than it takes for you to send them to a different folder. The exception to this rule is when you respond immediately and expect an immediate response.
- Today: Anything That Requires An Answer Today.
- This week: Anything that needs an answer before the end of the week.
- This month / quarter: – Anything that requires a long term response. Depending on your role, you might need a monthly folder. The rest can work on a quarterly basis.
- For your information, most of the materials I receive are informational in nature. If I think I might need to reference the email again, I will save it in this folder.
So, instead of ordering your emails by sender or subject, you order them by priority and type, mostly when you want to do something with a message and how important it is to progress through it in the near future. Likewise, this system works well with search, which, as we mentioned, you should use instead of folders , because it gives you the feeling of a clean inbox without simply archiving everything, allows you to search for certain things, but still gives you real organization.
For information about the system as a whole, including some tips for setting it up, follow the link below.
Just Five Email Folders Your Inbox Will Ever Need | Fast company through Swissmiss