Bonjour. This is Cyril from Work Smarter Live Better.
In this video I want to share one simple trick that can save you a lot of time.
I’m at the moment working with one of my clients in New York. We’ve just had an interesting discussion about filing. The managers I am working with receive many documents every day. Emails with attachments. To file them many have created complex filing systems with folders, sub folders, sub-sub-sub folders. Some of them have so many emails that they had to create many PST which are email archiving systems in Outlook.
My suggestion – one folder…
Well actually it is two folders to file: my friend the bin and a folder called Archive.
That’s it. Nothing else. Most of your emails should end up in my friend the bin (for more details on this have a look at a previous blog called 80 10 10). However if you really want to keep an email, just keep it into the Archive folder.
Why? Well you do not need many folders. You just need to know how to use the search function. It is so easy to search for an email. You simply type the name in your search box or a word that was in the email. You can even narrow your search by who it was from, who you sent it to, key words in the body and so on. With the search function, you can easily find most emails.
So, don’t keep folders and sub-folders for your emails. Just two places to file: my friend the bin and Archive. That’s it, no more. This will make it super easy to file. You just have to drag an email into your archive. And super easy to retrieve, because you don’t have to look in ten different potential places for it.
This is this week’s Work Smarter Live Better trick. I hope you enjoy it.
A bientôt
Cyril
