Keeping up with emails

I’ve always had a problem keeping up with my emails - it’s an organisational problem that’s being building up for a long time.

I prioritise client emails to respond to and always deal with those - but then there are all the other, non-client, emails I receive.

I usually end up opening a string of these other emails I feel I should answer soon, and then leave others in Outlook to come back to, later.

These keeps on for a few weeks, and then inevitably the PC crashes and I lose all the emails I had open. Sometimes I’m able to forward all open emails to myself first - and then have no idea which I was really interested in.

So now I’m keeping as organised as possible - there are still about 160 unread in my email box, mainly old ones I wanted to refer to later (such as news stories I emailed myself) or something else of interest. The figure is going down, though. It was quite a challenge to get it under 200 unread emails!

Everything is now opened and dealt with - if I can answer and get it sorted within a couple of minutes, I do so. This reduces the amount of emails I leave open. And rather than leave low priority emails unread, I open them, then delete or act on them.

Client emails still get read and replied to, but because I’ve previously allowed a backlogue, this means someone a client email can get lost in the crowd - not a good thing.

Anyway, the emails are not being sorted out as they arrive, and while it increases my work tempo somewhat, that can hardly be a bad thing. :)