#29 Cleaning Up Email Account

I have a pretty good folder/file system for my email, but even with that, stuff can pile up quickly. I went through all my folders and deleted ruthlessly. I would say 90% of the stuff I discarded was stuff I saved for good reason, but have since finished the project they were concerned with, so should have deleted them before now.

I do this fairly regularly, but every time, I find that I delete at least one thing that I will need in the coming weeks, and it's almost always a CMA (Cover My...er...Anatomy) document.


My biggest weakness is not wanting to throw anything away immediately. I've been trying to get better at discarding emails that require no action from me.

I never keep more than five or six messages in my inbox at one time.


The most useful thing I learned here was in the netiquette section. A couple of my duties require sending relatively large attachments to branches. They are customized to each branch and are not to be seen by other branches (it's all v. cloakanddagger), so the S drive was not an option. I had never heard of YouSendIt and will try it out next time I send out the attachments.