Productivity Ideas
Filtering & Color Coding Your E-Mail For Success
Pretend that you're currently involved in multiple businesses or affiliate programs requiring a consistent sorting process of hundreds and even thousands of emails every day. Now imagine that your orders, customer questions, and personal contacts are piling up as they keep you away from filling requests or actually taking some time for yourself. -- Could you handle this type of workload, without snapping like your trusty No. 2?
By teaching yourself to use these simple "filtering and e-mail color coding ideas", your productivity levels will soon increase as your daily stress level decreases.
To begin saving mass amounts of time and energy with your daily e-mail chores, be sure you are aware of all the actions your current e-mail client can perform to save you from having to sort through your new messages one by one.
Your e-mail client's help file, (open your client and press the F1 key, using your keyboard), should provide you with specific details on any of the following options, including the information found below.
For most clients, a great number of these actions can be performed automatically as your new mail enters and lists/loads. You can also program your client to run manually for specific folders or areas of the system at your command.
Note: A manual filtering processes could save you from missing important information and loss of data, should filters be set incorrectly.
When applying filters and moving new e-mail to folders or the trash bin just isn't enough, look to the use of color coding new messages, by level of importance, to keep on track for both personal and business environments.
Be sure to double check your information before saving rule sets for automated processing.
Mixing business with pleasure could be a recipe for disaster. Try to keep your personal and business account information separated at all times. When the 5 O'clock whistle sounds, close your business e-mail until the next business day and take some time for yourself. Shoot over to your personal e-mail account and let the system filter your information just the same.
| copy | move | forward | extract |
| append | send text or binary file | add or remove from list | |
| run program | highlight | expire or select | mark read |
| play a sound | call labels | return from call | goto label |
| skip to next message | message dialog | set identity | mark significant |
| business card exports | merge options | distribution lists | shut down client |
Since all e-mail clients will have a variation of settings, a general *right click* action on each of your messages should display a "Set Color" or "Label" option. You can also save your changes so all messages that match your criteria will perform the same color coding action through use of filters when you retrieve or import future message from the ISP or system server. This tip is especially useful for webmasters who run more than one domain and will need to keep site or customers information properly filtered for future reference.
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While good time management skills are a key ingredient in the daily tasks you will perform with your personal business, if you don't recognize these important details at first, you soon will.
Processing between 1,500 to 2,100 e-mail per day (as an average with a peak of more than 3,000 to 4,700 during busy seasons like Christmas) shouldn't be a problem for every day activities and just one employee (you). This filtering & color coding e-mail process has saved us a great amount of time and effort and will also save you a great amount of time and energy for recognizing what's most important in your daily multi-tasking chores. And, that's a success strategy you can literally bank on!