How many email messages are in your “inbox” right now? If the answer is more than one hundred, you may want to think about your “email strategy.”
There are many different ways to handle incoming mail. If your current methods work for you, stop reading this post and get back to checking your email. But if you’re frustrated and are looking for a different way to handle that mail, consider using your email inbox as a “to-do list.” When you’ve opened and read an email and it doesn’t require a reply or other action, either delete it or if you want to keep it, file it in a folder that you’ve set up with categories to help you classify and prioritize email. You can also use flags to tag email that you want to look at again soon but don’t have time to deal with now.
If your spam email box is filling daily, scan through it once a day to make sure that a valid email hasn’t been automatically tossed there and then delete all the spam for that day.
With a bit of organization, you will find it easier to find emails when you want to refer to them again and are less likely to forget to answer an important one.