Make E-Mail Work For You

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood, author of the Overcome Email Overload series of books, isn't surprised that technology hasn't solved the in-box management headaches of E-mail users.

A self-proclaimed E-mail anthropologist, Sherwood sees historic precedent in E-mail's seemingly slow evolution. For centuries, monks handwrote books, so copies of the same text varied greatly and there was no point in numbering or indexing the pages. It took 65 years after Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, unifying the appearance of printed publications, before anyone had the bright idea of numbering and indexing the pages in books.

Until an ideal in-box management system is developed, Sherwood has a few basic recommendations:

Look upon filing E-mail as the opposite of filing paper documents. With paper, filing is the easy part--pick a category and stick the document in the related folder. Finding it can be another matter, especially when you can't remember what category a document has been filed under. With E-mail, it's the filing part that seems to have people stumped, while search tools make finding messages relatively easy. So assume you'll be able to find messages. Just come up with a system that's easy for you to follow.Along those lines, Sherwood says that people are overly dependent on using multiple folders, which she sees as places where messages go to die. Her suggestion: Have just two folders, your in-box and a "done" archive. Leave any messages that require further action in the in-box, and move all other messages to the done archive. Retrieval tools are good enough that categorizing archives isn't necessary, she says. If message subjects are too vague, or preceded by "Re:," make a copy, rename the message, and send it to yourself for filing.Most important, don't rely on automated tools for routing messages--they simply don't work well. Says Sherwood: "Computers are dumber than turkeys, and turkeys will drown in the rain."