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Getting Organized: Think Differently About Data


By Jill Duffy
ARTICLE DATE : December 29, 2011 pcmag.com

Getting and staying organized is like losing weight. Short-term solutions don't work. You've got to make
lifestyle changes that you and your employees or business partners can stick to in the long-term.

In this series, I'll provide tips on how to get both your business and your own personal data organized by
addressing:
1. How your business thinks about information.
2. Naming conventions for folders and how to think about them.
3. Naming conventions for files.
4. Information sharing.
5. How to manage email.

A Diet for Being Organized


When it comes to losing weight, some people find that a diet of five or six small meals throughout the day
works for them, while others need three regimented meals and absolutely no snacking in between. Some
people buy a gym membership (the impetus to actually go might come from the money they've spent) while
others are better off fitting little bouts of exercise into their daily routine, like taking the stairs instead of the
elevator or cycling to work.

The point is, the same solutions don't work for everyone. It's the same with being organized.

Ways of Thinking About Information


Gettingand stayingorganized has to be a lifestyle commitment for your business. Every employee and
stakeholder in the day-to-day operations has to be able to stick to the program. Your system for being
organized has to consist of practices that fit into everyone's routines, whether it means taking small steps
consistently, such as deleting unnecessary files as you go, or taking larger steps on a regimented
schedule, such as reserving every Friday afternoon for cleaning out inboxes.

So before you put yourself and your co-workers on a new diet for being organized, take a moment to think
about how your business views information organization. Some possibilities are:
by date or month, such as when something first occurred or is scheduled to be completed
by project name
by the name of the person responsible
by fiscal quarter

Matching Practices to Reality


It's important not to try and fit one of these organizational systems onto your business if it doesn't reflect
how your team actually operates. Ask your colleagues, if they needed to find a particular document, maybe
an invoice or a contract, where would they look first? More importantly, how would they look? Do they
search their computer or the company's network by vendor name, date, product description? Do they open
a folder and skim file names, or sort by date, or sort by file type? How long does it take them to find the
information? Are they wasting time because they're searching in a way that doesn't help them narrow down
their results quickly?

You don't need a formal meeting to do this. Just drop by and ask. It will take you two minutes.

There
Page 1 of 2may be more than one answer. At times, you might remember the month and year in which
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There may be more than one answer. At times, you might remember the month and year in which a project
launched, while your colleague might fixate on the name of the project. And in both cases, the information
isn't necessarily static. Maybe the project had a code name during its development, and maybe it launched
late. In the next article about folder naming conventions, I'll explain how to implement a system that can
handle these kinds of incongruities.

Sleep On It
Doing this exercise should help shape your understanding of how your business should structure its
informationbut sleep on it for a day or two, and then try it again before making any decisions or changes
to your existing structure. Sometimes we forget why certain practices are in place, and changing them
abruptly could inadvertently destroy some other business rationale.

For example, I used to work in an office where freelancer contracts where sorted into two actual hanging
file folders, one for invoices and one for tax forms. It seemed to me to make much more sense to merge
them into one. Why have two file cabinets and two folders both labeled "Doe, Jane?" Whenever I needed
access to invoices, I typically also needed to look up the freelancer's tax information. Why not just simplify
the system? One reason that's obvious to me now but wasn't at the time is that many people in the
organization needed access to the invoices, but few people should have access to the personal data, such
as social security numbers. It's a good thing my manager understood this rationale and was able to explain
it to me before I reorganized the entire system.

Take Aways
The first steps to take-away from this article are:
1. Ask your colleagues and yourself: "How do I think about our information?"
2. Let the answers mill around in your head for a day or two before you come to any conclusions.
3. A structure of some kind should start to emerge. When you can see it, don't worry about reacting on it
just yet.

Remember that getting organized is like staying fit. Nothing is going to change overnight, and it's more
important to make the right lifestyle changes for you and your organizationchanges that will stick.

Copyright (c) 2015 Ziff Davis Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Page 2 of 2 Sep 01, 2015 02:14:32PM MDT


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Getting Organized: Use Folders to Unclutter Your Desktop


By Jill Duffy
ARTICLE DATE : December 29, 2011 pcmag.com

In this special five-part series, Jill Duffy shares tips that will help both individuals and business managers
reorganize their computer files to increase productivity and reduce digital errors.

Getting and staying organized is like losing weight. Short-term solutions don't work. You've got to make
lifestyle changes that you and your employees or business partners can stick to in the long-term.

In this series, I'll provide tips on how to get both your business and your own personal data organized. The
previous article explained the importance of understanding how your business thinks about information.
Now I'll show you how to put that groundwork into practice with computer folder naming conventions and
structures. Most businesses will implement these folder structures either on their servers or within a
project-management suite, but they are equally applicable right on your own desktop or in an e-mail client.

What Are Folders, Really?


Folders are the skeleton of your business. Like a building's structure, they support everything else that
goes up around them, from creative design to straightforward functionality.

I've worked in seven different offices in the course of my career. The teams that had clean and
common-sense folder structures were always the ones best positioned for continued success and growth.

Small businesses in particular should note that fact: An organized company is one that's positioned for
growth. You may think that because there are only two people in the company now, you can keep a lot of
information in your head and not map it out to a folder structure. Unfortunately, when it's time to hire new
employees and grow your business, you'll waste a lot of time teaching them your convoluted system. You'll
waste even more time and money correcting mistakes, time and money you should be spending on growth.

Your folder structure is a reflection of your business structure. Folders are nested within other folders in a
hierarchical system that needs to match the hierarchical order of your work.

In discussing how you and other people in your business think about information (you did that part, right?),
you probably started to see a hierarchy of some kind unfold. I recommend sketching out that structure. It
doesn't matter if you sketch it on paper, in bullet points, or in a note-taking application like Evernote for
Windows (free to $45 per year, 4.5 stars), or using mind-mapping software. Putting it in writing will help you
see if there are inconsistencies or overlaps.

An Example Structure
The structure of your design will be unique, but because it helps tremendously to see an example, I'll show
you the basic one that I use on my desktop.

As a writer, I primarily work on product reviews. When I think about reviews, I see three categories in my
mind's eye: 1) ideas for products to review, 2) articles that are in-progress, and 3) reviews that are finished.
Within the "finished" category, I tend to remember reviews by their publication date, which I simplify to
month and year because there are never too many within a single month that I would lose sight of them.
Within the "ideas" category, things are kind of fluid. Some ideas encompass more than one product, while
others relate to a single thing. But just because they're fluid, doesn't mean I can't have a system for
keeping them organized. Within the "in-progress" category, I think of the name of the product I'm reviewing.
Now, how does this translate to folders?
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Now, how does this translate to folders?
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This system works because it's


important for me to see a snapshot of
ideas and things in progress. They
are right in the name of the folders,
so I see them immediately when I
open my "REVIEW" folder. I don't
need to see all the names of
products I've finished reviewing, so I
tuck them into folders according to
their publication date. All the names
Get Organized: Folder Systems (Part 2 of 5) of the folders are consistent. When
the status of a project changes from
being in-progress to being finished, I drag and drop it into the corresponding folder, and its naming
convention is the same as all the other folders that are with it. For example, I can drag a Roman numeral
folder, such as ii, up to the level of c and d without having to rename it and it will fit right into the system.

Tips and Tricks


Numbers. Notice how the month folders start with four digits. The first two digits are for the year, and the
second relate to the month. I like to see names of the months as well, so I put them at the end after an
underscore. I am a big proponent of using four- or six-digit numeral for dates for a few reasons. First, I
personally tend to remember when things happened, so it's easy for me to find things if I can look for them
by date. Second, folders always appear in order by date when I sort them by name because alphabetically
1101 comes before 1102 comes before 1103, etc.

Using dates becomes extremely useful when you have to archive, which I'll talk about in an upcoming
article on e-mail management.

Tags. In my example, I use all capital letters for the folders starting with "IDEAS_" because I want "ideas"
to stick together when I sort by name. I think of these as tags. For in-progress reviews, I don't bother with a
tag. I just name the folder by the product name. If I had more than about 20 product reviews in progress at
a time, I would probably alter my folder naming convention and add a tag to let all the in-progress stuff
hang together. "IN-PROGRESS_" would probably be too long, but maybe something as simple as "IN_"
would work.

It turns out that "IN_" in particular wouldn't work, and here's why: When I sketched out my entire folder
structures, I used the word "in" elsewhere to mean something very specific. See how important it is to
sketch out the whole thing first?

Unique. One of the reasons to use tags and numbers is that it helps keep file names unique. You never
want two files or folders named the same thing because if you accidentally drag and drop them to the same
location, one could overwrite the other. And, of course, it's confusing.

Special characters. Underscores are my best friend in folder naming conventions. They're clean and
keep the text easy to read. Some people use spaces and hyphens in their folder namesit's up to you.
Whatever you choose, always stay conscious of how the characters affect alphabetical name sorting.

Sometimes
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Sometimes I use an underscore at the beginning of a folder name when I always want that folder to appear
at the top, like "_DONE." Then I can easily drag and drop anything that's completed to the top folder.
Alternatively, if I wanted it at the bottom, I could name it "z_DONE."

Color. Mac OS is fantastic at letting you quickly color-code folders by right-clicking. You can do it on a PC,
but it's clunky. I relied on color-coding when I worked on highly collaborative design projectsmy
colleague and I labeled folders on a shared server as yellow when the contents were new and not yet
polished, orange after the files had passed their first design phase, and so on through purple, which
indicated that the work was done.

Whatever system you implement, stick to it! Consistency is key to staying organized. Remember that being
organized, like staying in shape, requires long-term lifestyle changes, not quick fixes. As much as possible
and as much as it makes sense, try to use the same basic principles across all projects, teams, and
departments in the whole business.

Take Aways
The steps to remember from this article are:
1. Sketch out your folder structure before implementing it.
2. Organize information hierarchically, thinking about what you will need to see and know in a snapshot
view when you look in a folder.
3. Use letters, numerals, and special characters in your folder names to get them to appear in an intelligent
order.
4. Be consistent with naming conventions when you create new folders.

Copyright (c) 2015 Ziff Davis Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Getting Organized: Great Tips for Better File Names


By Jill Duffy
ARTICLE DATE : December 29, 2011 pcmag.com

In this special five-part series, Jill Duffy shares tips that will help both individuals and business managers
reorganize their computer files to increase productivity and reduce digital errors.

How you and your co-workers name your files is as important as how you name your folders. Doing it
intelligently, systematically, and logically from the start positions your business for success, long-term
growth, and stability.

Many businesses considering a new organizational push likely have an enormous backlog of old files that
they won't want to rename (at least not right away). That's okay. You've got to start sometime.

In many cases, it makes sense to implement a new system when starting a new project, team, fiscal
quarter or year--whatever major landmarks your business has. It makes sense to start from a significant
point in time in part because of how you'll deal with the disorganized archives. In a year, you'll be able to
find and manage everything recent that you need effortlessly, but you won't be able to find older things that
predate your new system quite as easily. I'll give you a few tricks for handling those archives without
spending months (or an intern's youth) renaming them all.

File Names
As with folders, file names must be:
unique
indicative of what the file contains
in line with how your business thinks about information
scannable (with the human eye) according to how you and your employees find information
naturally ordered alphabetically
consistent!

Unique. It is absolutely crucial that file names be unique, especially if you work in a collaborative
environment, and especially if you frequently copy files to a server. If you don't have a system for how you
keep file names unique, you risk overwriting them and losing all your data. In collaborative environments,
it's common to intentionally overwrite files. If, like me, you've grown inured to the pop-up warning ("Are you
sure you want to replace the existing file with the newer one?"), nothing is going to stop you from
overwriting the wrong file if it has the same name.

For example, let's say I have a new invoice from Gray's Electronics named Grays-invoice.pdf, dated
yesterday. I might stick it on the server in the Invoices folder, and I might get a warning that a file by that
name already exists. I might also assume that since the invoice came in yesterday, someone else put it
there-- but I just had the accounting department sign this invoice, so mine must be the most recent one, so
I'll overwrite the old one. The whole thing falls to pieces when someone asks me later that day to pull up
Gray's prior invoice, you know, the one from two months ago... the one with the same file name, which is
now gone.

Indicative. It's seems silly to state that file names should indicate what they contain, but I've seen it go
wrong plenty of times. Many people assume that when they nest a within a folder, the folder takes care of
the larger category name. They also falsely assume that the most relevant contents of a file to them will be
also be obvious to anyone else who needs to access the file. Let's take the invoicing example again. Say

the1 accounting
Page of 3 department finds invoices in three ways: invoice number, tax ID, and the
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the accounting department finds invoices in three ways: invoice number, tax ID, and the fiscal month in
which it was paid. Accounting couldn't care less that it's "Gray's invoice."

I personally use two major identifiers for all my files: numerical dates and codes. At home, I blog several
times a month. All the text files and photos that I use on my blog are classified with a four digit date (YR
MO) and the classifier "bg" for "blog." A photo of a market in Montreal taken during a trip in September
2010 is called 1009bg_montreal_market.jpg. The four-digit numerals work for my blog files because I only
write on average four or five posts per month.

Sometimes, though, I might have dozens of photos from a particular month. In that case, I either code them
with a six-digit number, adding the day to the end, or I abbreviate some other signifier to save characters
so I can add more descriptive text to the file names. For example:
1009bg_mnrl_mrkt_peppers01.jpg
1009bg_mnrl_mrkt_peppers02.jpg
I know before I even open the files that these are both photos of peppers that I posted on my blog (bg),
taken in September 2010 (1009), in Montreal (mnrl), at the market (mrkt).

Another trick, if you travel a lot, it so use the airport code to signify the location: YUL for Montreal, LAX for
Los Angeles, LHR or LGW for London, and so on.

In-line with the Business Thought Process. As you might have guessed from the above example, I
know I can count on my memory to pull up information by date. In deciding how your naming conventions
will work, you need to know how your business remembers information. But dates also kill two birds with
one stone. They code the file for when it occurred or was significant and get you halfway to having unique
names. I will never accidentally open pictures from my Montreal trip from 2006 when I really want the ones
from 2010, even if I shot photos at markets both times.

I absolutely recommend including a date in your file names. The only real question is, which date is most
useful to your business? The date an invoice was sent or processed, or the date the work was completed
or when the contract was signed? Business owners, team leaders, and department managers should be
making the final call, but do talk to the people who do the most day-to-day work first. They're the ones who
will know what really makes sense.

Scannable. When you open a folder, you want to know its contents immediately, without opening files or
squinting at thumbnail views. Devising the right file-naming convention includes figuring what the key
information is in each document. I cringe when I see someone's computer with the file resume.doc. Which
resume is it? When was it updated? Is it a long version or a short one? Where will it be sent?
1102_CV_marketing_digital.doc might be the resume that highlights your digital marketing experience,
whereas 1102_CV_short.doc might be the generic professional CV you intend to update when you apply to
law school.

Just think of how much more productive you and your colleagues could be of you knew with high certainty
what each file contained before you opened it.

Naturally Ordered. Another reason I like to use dates as identifiers is because everything will fall in
chronological order when the folder is sorting files by name, which is typically the default. Sorting by actual
file date only tells you when files were last updated, and that's unlikely to be the primary thing you want or
need to know. If you always put the YR MO DA at the beginning of the file name, you will always have
order.

Consistency.
Page 2 of 3 Previously, I made the analogy that being organized is like staying in shape.
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Consistency. Previously, I made the analogy that being organized is like staying in shape. Change doesn't
happen overnight. Rewards come in the long term, not the short term. You need to make changes that are
right for you and that will last, rather than hop on a fad diet. When you get the sense that you've found a
solution you can live with, stick to it!

Dealing with Archives or Older Files Intelligently


No one expects you to reorganize and rename your entire archive of data. It's not a valuable way to spend
your time, and it's ludicrous to think that you could even pull it off. So what should you do with all those
disorganized files and folders from the past?

Thinking about all your files at once is unmanageable. That's why they're disorganized! The easiest way to
start tackling your archives is to think of two groups: old and really old. How you define old and really old is
up to you.

For me, "really old" means I am more than 99 percent sure that I will not access the file ever againbut it
could happen. "Really old" stuff, for me, needs to also be at least three years old. Files that meet those two
criteria are ready to archive to disc.

Regular "old" generally refers files that I worked on within one and three years ago. These stay on my hard
drive or server, where I can access them if I need to, but get dumped into year folders. I have folders
labeled "2010," "2009," and "2008."

Putting older content into folders by year lets you do a spring cleaning. Have you ever tried to thoroughly
clean your closet without emptying it? It doesn't work. To get organized, you need a fresh start. Sweeping
all your files into folders by year gives you that clean start without removing anything you might actually
need. You need to see a clean and tidy window before you can get organized!

What do you do with a file that spans multiple years? Stick it in the most recent year folder. Did you work on
it last year? Then it should be in last year's folders. If you're worried you won't be able to find it, why? Your
files are already a mess! You probably have to search for the file anyway, so what does it matter if it's
nested inside one more folder?

Take Aways
The important take-away points from this article are:

1. The file-naming convention that your business uses needs to be understood by everyone in the
organization.
2. File-naming conventions should help people find information quickly by scanning names or by looking for
dates or other signifiers in the name.
3. Files that are "naturally-ordered" are easier to scan and sort.
4. Be consistent with naming conventions.
5. Avoid a huge overhaul project by simply archiving older data by year.

Copyright (c) 2015 Ziff Davis Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Getting Organized: Smarter Data Sharing


By Jill Duffy
ARTICLE DATE : December 29, 2011 pcmag.com

In this special five-part series, Jill Duffy shares tips that will help both individuals and business managers
reorganize their computer files to increase productivity and reduce digital errors.

Communication is the lifeblood of every business. Yet too many business leaders, caught up in day-to-day
challenges, overlook the need for giving employees practical ways to share information.

What I mean by "sharing information" encompasses oral communication, written documentation,


maintaining a server, writing email, and more. For the purpose of this article, I'll focus on electronic
documents, but it's extremely important to consider how information sharing happens across the
organization and at all levels.

The Importance of Sharing


Why is sharing information important? The better your information sharing is, the more effectively your
business will operate. Giving employees the information they need to succeed at their jobs and do them
better increases their job satisfaction, too.

When information is not shared well, businesses run less efficiently and waste money. Every time a new
employee joins the teamwhether as a permanent replacement, temp (disability, maternity leave,
sabbatical), or in a new rolethat person needs to learn a huge amount about his or her job function, as
well as how the business operates. When employees share information well, new team members learn
what they need to know faster. And what they really need to know is how and where to find information,
rather than specific answers to questions. It's the "teach a man to fish" principle.

One of the most expensive costs in a business is hiring because of the time lost in getting new employees
up to speed. The quicker employees figure out how to answer their own questions, the sooner they can
make significant contributions to your bottom line. Your goal in improving information-sharing across the
company is to make it easy for people to solve their own problems. Another goal is to minimize the number
of times people repeat the same mistakes. Imagine how much more smoothly and profitably your business
could operate if you minimized these costs.

Types of Information Employees Share


Let's consider a few specific types of information that should be shared: procedural documentation, staff
organization charts, workflow charts, staff contact information, client contact information, and human
resources forms. In all likelihood, your business has made HR forms easily accessible to all
employees--usually because the law requires it. When it comes to all those other documents, though,
chances are they're out of date or they don't exist at all.

Instead, a lot of the information that should be written down is stored in someone's head, and that's
problematic for a number of reasons. For starters, one person should never be the sole keeper of any
business-critical information. It's just too risky. If that person falls ill, leaves the organization, or comes to
resent people or practices within the organization, it could set the business back years! Second, when
information is stored in someone's head rather than in a visible location, no one else can contribute to it.
Third, other people who need the information are never sure if they have the most updated version. The
reasons go on and on.

One of the most amazing assets of the entry-level workforce is that they know how to look stuff up. If they
need
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One of the most amazing assets of the entry-level
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385618,00.asp workforce is that they know how to look stuff up. If they
need to know something (such as how to write formulas in Excel) and can figure out the basic terms used
to describe it (for example, sum, product, linked spreadsheets), they can find the answer online.

All too often, businesses are not designed to support this kind of self-sufficiency. In the workplace, you
can't always look up the answer. Sometimes you have to hunt down people and shake the information you
need out of them, as I mentioned in the previous section. The answers aren't stored in a searchable place.
But they should be!

Getting People to Share


If you're reading this article and thinking, "My business is in the weeds. W will never have the time or the
resources to do this kind of back-log work," fear not. Here's how you break it down into a four-step
manageable project.

1. Explain the importance of sharing. Bluntly tell the people in your organization, in a 15-minute meeting,
why having shared documents is important.

2. Set aside a half day for the documentation project. Buy everyone lunch if you have to sweeten the deal.

3. If your business is arranged into teams, each team should meet to discuss what documents they need to
assemble or update. They can also prioritize which documents are most important to create based on what
knowledge lives only in one person's head.

4. During the half-day project, each person will be responsible for just one document. For complicated
processes, two or more people can be responsible. The goal of the project is to set up the documents the
business needs--not finish every one entirely that day.

At the end of the half-day project, the team members (or the entire organization, if your business is small)
should share with one another what they created and how far they got. Make sure everyone understands
that all the documents are meant to become living documents.

That last step is crucial and deserves a word or two of explanation.

Living Documents
A living document is one that changes with time and typically can be changed by a group of people, not just
one administrator. It's crucial that everyone who is affected by the documents have a chance to weigh in on
how they're handled and what's in them, even junior staff, who might in fact be the most knowledgeable
people about certain tasks.

The whole purpose of living documents is to make them open and transparent to all the people who need
access to them--and not just existing employees, but future employees, too.

Recently, a friend of mine needed to fix a spreadsheet that his organization had been using to calculate
costs in a department. The spreadsheet contained incorrect formulas, and the person who had set it up
had locked the file--and had retired a few years earlier. After a little poking around on a shared server, my
friend found a document that only senior staff could access, which contained the password. He was
extremely lucky that the previous employee had thought ahead to put that information in a place where the
right people could find it. However, even in this case, it would have been better had my friend (and all the
senior staff) known ahead of time that this document with the password existed, where it was located, and
what it was named.

Consistency
Living
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Living documents can be kept on shared servers or managed as a wiki. If the files are hosted on a server,
you'll need to roll out your guidelines for naming conventions so that as people add new files and folders to
the server (or archive older files), they're doing it in a consistent manner. If everyone is on the same page,
the names will be consistent, and everyone will be able to find what they need quickly.

The last step in sharing information is making the living documents available to the people who need them,
and for this, you'll need to return to file and folder naming conventions. Even if you create a wiki, you'll want
to have some kind of standard in place for how pages are named and organized within the site.

Be sure to explain to all the employees what naming conventions are being used and why. Be clear about
what you want them to do and why. Here are some key points to emphasize:
1. Being organized helps us succeed as a business and as a team.
2. Using consistent naming conventions keeps us all on the same page and enhances our team mentality.
3. Having a system saves you time because you'll be able find things quickly.
4. You'll minimize your own errors, such as deleting data or overwriting files.
5. As the organization grows, we will be able to handle new business more efficiently.
6. When we hire new employees, training them will take less time, and getting them into our pattern of
thinking will happen faster.

Take Aways
The important ideas to take away from this article are:
1. Sharing information is crucial to business success and requires everyone's participation.
2. Living documents can and should change over time; living documents must be accessible to multiple
people who are able to change them, as well as visible to all the people who rely on them, but present and
future.
3. Documents that are labeled and stored in a consistent manner are easy to find, and thus, will actually be
used.

Copyright (c) 2015 Ziff Davis Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Get Organized: How to Avoid Email Overload


By Jill Duffy
ARTICLE DATE : December 29, 2011 pcmag.com

In this special five-part series, Jill Duffy shares tips that will help both individuals and business managers
reorganize their computer files to increase productivity and reduce digital errors.

The last piece of the organization puzzleand the one people tend to dread the mostis email
management.

As with folder management and file naming conventions, email management requires a lifestyle solution.
You need to develop rules and principles that you can live with every day. Remember that staying
organized is similar to maintaining a diet and exercise regimen. Not doing so and treating organization like
it's a one-day spring cleaning project is similar to going on a crash diet. Any results you do see will be very
short-lived.

Before you dive into your email reorganization project, take a moment to realize that you don't have to be
perfect. The goal is to come up with rules for living that you can reasonably stick to and that make your
work or personal life easier, more productive, and better. If installing a nifty new Microsoft Outlook plug-in
is the thing that will spark your inbox-cleaning engine, try Xobni (free, $29.99 Plus version, 4 stars), which
indexes your files, or Evernote for Windows Premium ($45 per year, 4.5 stars), which lets you send email
to your Evernote where you have the benefit of that software's outstanding search capabilities.

See the Bottom of the Box


The moment I realized I needed a systematic approach to email was the first time I opened my inbox and
had more than three pages of stuff just sitting there. Most of the files had been marked "read," but because
I hadn't acted on them, I left them in the inbox. I remember feeling overwhelmed and thinking that if I didn't
start throwing away emails that very second, the problem would be worse within the hour, and would surely
be unbearable by the next morning.

As a result, I set one simple goal for myself: Always be able to see both the bottom of my inbox. In other
words, I want to be able to see entries for the most recently received message and oldest message in a
single screen.

I don't hold myself to this standard every moment of every day. That would be neurotic and
counterproductive. But I do aim to see the bottom of my inbox before I leave work every day, and if that
fails, at least on Fridays. I also stay sane about email overload when I'm out sick for a day or take time off.
After I've returned from a vacation, I give myself at least a week to catch up on email and try not to stress
about it the first day or two back in the office.

Month-to-Month
The way I manage my business email account is exactly the same way I manage my electronic files into
folders. Everything goes into a folder.

First, I create a few basic folders by project, such as Project A, B, and C. Within each project folder, I
create subfolders for each month, labeled with the two-digit year and month, underscore month letter
abbreviation. For example, the folder for June 2011 is named 1106_JUN.

When new emails come in, they often sit in my inbox for a few hours, a day, maybe even a week or two. But
they never overwhelm me because I have a system in place that keeps everything at a manageable level.
Here
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3 the rules for my system. These might not be right for you, but they can provide
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they never overwhelm me because I have a system in place that keeps everything at a manageable level.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385621,00.asp
Here are the rules for my system. These might not be right for you, but they can provide an example of one
solution. Tailor your own solution with rules that fit your lifestyle.

Rule 1. If the email doesn't require action (including re-reading), I throw it away immediately.

Rule 2. If an email is criticalmeaning it requires imminent action or deep re-reading and possibly a
replyit stays in the inbox until I act upon it. It can stay in the inbox up to a month. After a month, I must act
on it. That's the deadline. Once I've taken action, the email is filed to its corresponding folder.

Rule 3. If the email contains information I need, but does not require immediate action, it should be moved
to its corresponding folder by the end of the day, or the end of the week if I'm busy. If I'm afraid I will forget
to act on it because it's not immediately visible in the inbox, I can create a calendar item as a reminder. The
email must be filed in a folder. No exceptions.

Rule 4. Friday afternoon, I give myself 10 to 20 minutes to sort through whatever is in the inbox and
perhaps act on the items that don't require a lengthy response. By the time I leave the office, I should be
able to see an inch or two of white space at the bottom (room to fill up again over the weekend).

Rule 5. After a year, archive it or chuck it. I tend to keep email data for about a year and archive everything
else, which is extremely easy to do when your information is sorted into folders by month and year.

Another organization method that was popularized back in the day of physical paperwork is to create 31
folders, labeled numerically, with each number corresponding to a day of the month. Rather than create a
daily to-do list, you're supposed to file paperwork and reminders (and birthday cards, and bills to pay, etc.)
in the folders corresponding to the appropriate action date. When the date arrives, you open the folder and
are now tasked with taking care of whatever is inside.

Yet another method is compartmentalization. If you use a project management tool such as Basecamp
(free, 4 stars and an Editors' Choice), you never need to save emails associated with projects that are
managed in that system. Basecamp does that for you. A lot of people use compartmentalization in their
personal email life by dedicating one web-based account to listservs and mailing lists while reserving the
other for communicating with friends and family. Why not use the same concept in business?

Get Rid of Email Anxiety


I am by no means advocating that my system or the 31-day-folder system is right for everyone. My system
works for me because I tend to remember things based on when they occurred. Additionally, I actually look
forward to those few minutes at the end of every week when I do my once-over on the inbox. Lastly, the
basic goal of always being able to see the bottom of my inbox gives me comfort. Seeing information bleed
beyond one visual screen hits some kind of tipping point in me. It feels unbearable, like I can't find anything
and I will never dig my way out.

Other people, however, may feel anxious at having to manage more than a dozen folders, or meet
self-inflicted deadlines. It might be more productive for you to be able to see your mail in one single,
scrolling pane. At the risk of getting too touchy-feely, it's not a bad idea to write down the kinds of things
that make you feel overwhelmed because if you can identify what you don't want in your email, you can
create rules and guidelines to prevent it.

Whatever organizational system you create for yourself or your business, focus on lifestyle-like habits and
general rules. You don't have to be perfect every day. You just need to come up with a system that will
keep you on track.

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Take Aways
The important ideas to take away from this article are:
1. Having a manageable amount of email will make your work life easier and better.
2. In developing principles for handling email, focus on lifestyle habits rather than hard-and-fast rules.
3. Determine how you will handle email daily, weekly, and monthly, as well as how often you will archive
email data.
4. Figure out what you don't want from your email, and then create habits that prevent it from happening.

Copyright (c) 2015 Ziff Davis Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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