by Marina Shemesh

Created on: February 18, 2010   Last Updated: March 13, 2010

How to effectively manage personal emails

We all have those emails just lying in the inbox waiting for you to write a reply. Some of them have been gathering electronic dust since the day that you got your computer. Others emails have to wait for a month or two before you build up the nerve to send it to the trash pile.

It does not have to be like this, it really is possible to manage your personal emails effectively.

Set time aside to reply to emails.

You are going to have to organize yourself a time schedule for dealing with your personal emails and then stick to it. Don’t open your email box every five minutes to see if you have received something. You know that you will read only half of the emails, follow some obscure links, waste a lot of time and not write any replies.

Set half an hour aside in the mornings (if you have time) and half an hour in the evenings to manage your personal emails. Read every single email and decide if it should be deleted, replied to or saved. It is not easy, but triy to aim for an empty inbox. It will be filled up soon enough.

Be a fearless deleter.

Be honest, if you know that you do not feel like writing a reply to an email, will you feel like writing a reply three months from now? You know that it will get deleted sometime, so why not right now? You will spare yourself a lot of guilty feelings when you do not have that unanswered email staring at you anymore.

Don’t make a storage room of your inbox.

Any emails that you want to save should be filed straight away in the correct folder or you can choose to print it. You can create yourself a folder called “Correspondence” and there you can file away any of the important emails that you would like to keep.

Remember to burn really important emails onto a disk. A virus or lightening can crash your computer and delete any important files or emails that you wanted to keep.

Us e the Draft file.

Save your half written emails in the draft file if you have to look up some information or have run out of time. Half- written replies have a much better chance of being send than old emails being have of replied to. Just make yourself a limit of drafts, don’t have more than ten replies in the draft file waiting to be send.

Keep your mailbox tidy.

Every evening, after you have replied, deleted and saved the emails you wanted, make sure to empty your Trash and your Send files. It is possible to save to emails that you have written. Make yourself a file called something like “Correspondence send” to store these emails.

Remember that you mailbox will get stuck if you do not clean out the Trash and Send files often. Don’t keep an email just because you want to save the email address. Take the time to write all the email addresses you want in your Contacts folder.

It is not such a big effort to effectively manage your personal emails. With a little bit of effort you will be able to manage your inbox, be a good correspondent and even save yourself a lot of time.  You might even get to see how an empty inbox again!

Learn more about this author, Marina Shemesh.
Click here to send this author comments or questions.