Handling the email guilt trip

For me, managing email is one of life’s little chores that I never seem able to really keep up with. Outlook is my email program, but what I use as an indispensable tool to really manage it all is the excellent NEO Pro, a shell program that runs on top of and in tandem with Outlook.

I’ve been using NEO for the past three years. The program enables me to see my email in threads and conversations. It sorts all my email for me, creating the folders and grouping together what I receive and what I send so that I can have different views on it. I don’t need to do anything.

With just a mouse click or two, I can see my email by person, by conversation, by topic, by date, etc. I can decide what’s important, what’s regarded as bulk mail and what I don’t want to see at all. I can search my email, find those attachments and manage everything quite smoothly.

I can even access emails in all my archive PSTs from within the same program. Yes, it’s a real productivity tool.

So why is it that I still have a problem with email?

Jason Clarke may have the answer. You see, I’m a Piler not a Filer:

Filers tend to have a very large hierarchy of folders that they have built over time, and carefully move each email to it’s rightful place once it has served it’s purpose. For filers, nothing feels better than to completely empty their inbox; it means everything has been tidied up.

Pilers, on the other hand, tend to leave everything in their inbox. They feel that they can quickly search their inbox for anything that they might need, so they can’t be bothered to take the time to build a complicated and confusing hierarchy of folders to have to go looking through when they need to find an old message. Pilers consider their inbox as a storage area for tasks that are on the go, reminders, pretty much anything they might want to store in digital format.

In reality, I’m a wannabe Filer. NEO Pro does all the folder hierarchy for me. I do make an effort once a quarter, sorting stuff, archiving it, etc. Yet I still have a massive inbox in Outlook.

Then Jason hits home:

I consider Pilers to be rude.

You respond to your voicemail in a timely fashion, don’t you? If you can’t be bothered to adhere to a system that ensures you respond to the email you receive, you’re being rude.

If you’re a Piler, it really does need a commentary like this to make you stop and think about how you seem to others who send you email and don’t hear back from you, either in a timely fashion or at all. Even with a great productivity aid like NEO Pro, I am so guilty! Heck, I’ve even got other tools like Copernic Desktop Search that also searches emails.

Maybe that’s part of my problem. I have these tools that let me find anything. I don’t need to spend ages manually sorting, creating folders, etc, when I can call up a tool, type in a keyword or two and find the stuff I’m looking for. Maybe it’s a left-brain/right-brain thing. Indeed, it all counts for nothing if you don’t have the right approach in the first place.

However you approach it, Jason has made some excellent points and offers some simple guidance on managing your email. Thanks, Jason. I promise to do better and not to be rude.