I read a great article on Life Hacker recently titled Seven Productivity Myths, Debunked by Science (and Common Sense). Myth #6 (Sorting and Organization is the solution to Email Overload) will be of interest to Outlook users.
We all suffer from too much email… and most have tried various ways of trying to organize our emails… usually by organizing them into folders.
But here is something interesting from the LifeHacker article…
One University of California Santa Cruz study (commissioned by IBM) concluded that email technologies have gotten to the point where filing messages may actually make them harder to find, and more importantly, wastes your precious time
The study noted that it was simply more efficient to search when a message was needed than it is to scroll through folders, and then scroll through messages in a folder.
Our own survey from our 30,000+ readers seemed to indicate the same. Some of our own findings were:
- Maintaining a folder based email management system took too much time (and discipline)
- As a result it was too easy to procrastinate… and end up with emails everywhere.
- Many users are now using Outlook Search (or other search tools) to find emails. This was true even for users who were filing their emails in folders.
Read the rest of Life Hacker article for more information and for other non-email productivity tips as well.
Back to email… while we agree that Search is the way of the future, folders do provide some benefits that Search does not.
That is why we created Email Tags. Now Outlook users can get the benefits of both Search and Folders without actually having to use folders.
Email Tags works inside Outlook and allows you to get more control over your emails WITHOUT requiring that you change the way you currently work.
You can see how easy Email Tags for Outlook is by using the fully functional trial version or watching the short video on our website.
Do you still organize emails using folders?
Do you use Tags?
Tell us what works for you by leaving a comment on the blog
