Keep an Organized Inbox

A study last year by market research firm The Radicati Group found that in 2007, the average American will send and receive approximately 100 emails every day. With so many messages crowding your inbox at work and at home, keeping track of what’s important can be difficult. Here are 5 tips for tidying them up.

Step1

Reply right away. Important emails will get lost in the clutter of spam and forwards if you go more than a few days without checking your email. To keep your inbox from getting out of control, find at least 10 minutes every day to sort through messages and reply to the ones necessary.

Step2

Put each email in a specific folder. Remove messages from your inbox and put them in folders right away. While some people organize by labeling a folder for each business project they are working on, others have found it more efficient to file messages based on their urgency. For example, put emails you need to reply to by the end of the day in a folder titled “Today” and emails you have forwarded on for someone else to handle in a folder titled “Delegated.”

Step3

Hold on to everything. It is easy to get frustrated by the constant flow of emails, but deleting them too soon can confuse you in the future. Send spam to the trash, but wait at least one month to do the same with messages you think you no longer need. Then consider saving all emails from specific projects or months on a disk for future reference.

Step4

Filter spam. Most email programs have a spam filter that will automatically put unsolicited commercial messages in their own folder. After you activate the filter, scan through your spam folder once a week for things you actually need and delete the rest.