Folders for managing (email) floods.

For years I've had to keep track of communicaiton with many  customers at numerous sites covering a wide variety of questions and conversations.  Thankfully most have well defined start and end points to the conversations, so it is possible to use folders to segregate down to this level.  The ability to do this is key to my ability to juggle numerous conversations and not drop details.  For my work e-mails, I use the corporate standard "Microsoft Outlook", but most all e-mail clients (GMail, Yahoo, etc) support some level of mail automation.

For me, the key to this filing system is reflected in what our mothers always told us: "Put your things away."  Taking this to the on-line world, I try to keep my in-box free of clutter and only items that are one-offs or unique conversations that aren't expected to last long.  Where possible, I suggest automating if possible.  Most if not all modern e-mail clients allow for fairly complex rules to handle incoming e-mail.  At some level, the basics of sorting on the From: address into a common folder for emails from a specific person are available in even the most basic e-mail clients.  Beyond that, automation might take additional skill but should not be insurmountable.

For my needs (I'm a consultant and support engineer for my company), I have broken down my job functions by teams, customers, and trouble ticket.  The teams folder is a general category such as "consulting" , "support", etc). At this level i've also created a few unique foldes for "Inactive Customers", and some e-mails that don't fall into the categories but still need to have some long-term attention.  Since Outlook default sorts the folders based on name, I pre-pend a "@" to the name of folders that I want to appear at the top of the list.

Within those team groups, there are sub-folders based on customer names.  Eg: Appleton, Bakers, CostCo, Dales, Google, etc.  (It is at this level that I would suggest setting up filters based on the From: address if you do any automation.)  For the rare case that two customers might have the same general name (i.e. two separate divisions within the same parent organization), you might want to create a "Company-SubGroup" name (eg: "Google-SearchTeam" and a "Google-AdSenseTeam")

Before continuing, I'll take a quick departure into sorting and dates.  The standard US method of writing the date, Month/Day/Year, doesn't sort easily on computers.  Sure, they can be setup to sort this correctly, but the chronology of the folders is broken for simple views the email client provides.  Over the years I've got into the habbit of writing the date as Year/Month/Day, and having battled programming glitches introduced during the "Y2K" event, I've got into the habit of using a full four-digit year so my folders.  Using a dash ("-") for the field seperator, I write the date for "June 6, 2011" as "2011-06-14".  These date strings automaticall sort correctly and don't require any additional work on the part of ourselves or the email system.

Most people might be able to stop at this level.  For my job I may have numerous open support tickets with each customer, so keeping these different trains of though separated really helps track the current state of each problem.  For my needs, each time a new ticket comes in I create a folder named with the date of the initial contact, the support ticket number and a brief description of the problem.  This allows me to quickly scan for the problem should a co-worker need a quick update on my current workload, or quickly dive into the project without having to request and search for the un-friendly "ticket number".  So, a problem that came in on "June 14, 2011" and a subsequent ticket of "ID1234" was created to resolve "Problem updating server address" would look like this: "2011-06-14:ID1234 - Problem updating server address". 

When I finally resolve an problem tracked in the folder, I then move the entire folder to a "Closed" folder inside the customer name folder.  Depending on the ammount of information tracked about each customer, I'll create folders within here, too.  For example, for most customers I create a "year" folder (i.e. 2010, 2011) and move the ticket folder directly there.  For some customers I've found it necessary to break this folder into additional levels so I create folders based on the quarter (i.e. Jan-March = First Quarter, April-June = Second Quarter, etc).  So, using the example above, i'd move this into the "Closed/2011/2011Q2" folder.

This organizational method has allowed me to keep abreast of a huge volume of tasks and conversations.  No, it's not perfect.  There are times when the flow of incoming messages increase and the time required to sort them into their folders can be substantial, but continuing to do this allows me to quickly review the latest updates and resume when time permits (or the project has become the latest "high priority").

Some people have mentioned the "Inbox Zero" - http://inboxzero.com/ - as a possible solution.  I haven't read the details, but from what I understand it looks to be another method to keep the flow of elecrronic thoughts organized in our daily lives.