Email

Over the last several weeks, we have discussed points from the December 1 #ALedchat. Jennifer Hogan was kind enough to ask me to guest moderate. A great deal of discussion came out of the questions asked. This blog series has given me the chance to spotlight some of the tweets that brought up good points and go into more detail than the Twitter chat would allow.

I could not agree more. Email is a great vehicle for receiving information, but a terrible place for storing it. I have never been a proponent of multiple folders for email. The only one I keep is the “Archive” folder.

The question to ask about any email is as follows: “Is there some action I need to take on this email?” Two possible answers to that question exist: “Yes” and “No.”

If action is required on an email, send it to the to-do list. In this post, I talk about how to move emails to the to-do list from any of your devices. With the item on the list, you are able to assign a date to it, making sure you will see it again at the right time. You will be able to edit the note section, which will initially contain the entire body of the email. You will be able to follow that item through the many twists and turns our tasks sometimes take before completion.

If no action is required, then the email should be examined for the value of any reference information it embeds. Evernote is the place for that reference information. If you look in the “Account Info” menu of Evernote, you will see a special email address. Anything sent to that address goes into Evernote. You will want to create a new contact and call it “Evernote.” Paste that special email address into that contact. From now on, anytime you have an email that is valuable because of the reference information it embeds, forward it to Evernote. From there, you will be able to edit it, place it in the correct notebook, and apply any needed tags.

Email is a great place to trap communication. Don’t leave it there. Send the information to the right place and get from “In” to “Empty.”

This post concludes the series of follow-ups to the December 1 #ALedchat on “Organization Made Easy.” We do so just in time to ring in a new year. Many of us will have a New Years Resolution to “Get Organized!” For many, this series may have given you ideas on how to make 2015 more productive and less stressful.