LemBook Blog

This is a list of books that I just put up for auction on eBay.

Go to www.lembookbooks.com

Did you know that 50% of all emails, in a business, on average, after a cursory glance, are deleted?

I don’t know about you, but in my case, reading the above fact helped relieve my guilt about not saving everything.  I’m a hoarder by nature.  I like to save everything, thinking that someday I’ll need it.  This can cause problems – just ask my wife   Besides that, it sets a poor example and overloads the computer.  While I’m confessing things, I might as well admit that I save too many icons on my desktop.  I guess that I use the desktop as a “Some day – Maybe” file, or as an “I should” file.

Oh, Oh.  I forgot.  We were talking about an excessive number of emails. 

 Did you know that emails can be dragged and dropped?  Those that you’re sure you want to act on, you should drag onto your calendar or your “To Do” list.

With every email that you save you should ask “When am I going to do this?”  If it is strictly a reference email then just file it anywhere you want.  You can always use the search function to retrieve it when needed.  Otherwise, put it on your calendar.

Continuing with my advice on how to handle an overloaded inbox, I frequently get duplicate emails because I have so many different email addresses.  An easy way to find these duplicates is to enter the senders name into the search box, so that all of his emails show up together.  I can then easily pick out the duplicates and either delete them or unsubscribe from them.

Be careful, however, that you’re not also unsubscribing from some program that you want to remain a member of.  For this reason, I do a lot more deleting than unsubscribing.  I’m probably way too cautious.

There is an unexpected benefit to this method.  When you read all of a sender’s emails together you get a much deeper insight into that person.  There is more continuity, or lack thereof, when read together.

I can’t say that these methods have fully solved my inbox problem; there are still too many emails, but maybe this will inspire you to come up with some ideas that you can pass on to me.

Feel free to leave comments on my blog:  LemBookBlog.com.

I know I do, so let me tell you what I’ve done about it. First I bought Sally McGhee’s book “Take Back Your Life Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to get Organized and Stay Organized.” I set up her whole system, which took me forever, but found that I only used part of it.

For my emails, I set up a folder named after each sender of emails and saved each email, worth saving, in its appropriate folder. However, whenever I wanted to learn about some subject I could no longer remember which sender had emailed me information about that subject. So then I decided I should file my emails both by sender and by subject matter.

This, as you can imagine, soon became too time consuming and cumbersome.

I was stuck!

Fortunately, one day when I was browsing Microsoft’s site about using the program “One Note” I came upon an article by a Microsoft executive who had given up on using Sally McGhee’s methods and devised a different system.

Very simple. Don’t sort and file anything. Just save all the emails in one folder and use the search function to find whatever subject you want. I hope this helps you.

In my next email I’ll have some other tips.

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I’ve just joined the Great Olympic Giveaway and I had a horrible picture of my gift. Much to my surprise Borge Hansen, the administrator, fixed up the picture and entered my gift all on his own.
It is truly refreshing to see some one offering real service these days.
Hats off to Borge.
Visit his event by clicking on the link below.

www.great-olympic-giveaway.com