Organizing with Gmail

I was watching Trading Spouses last night. You may have seen something excited, but with the amount of time I watch TV, getting cable TV wouldn’t be worth the cost. So I’m stuck to 5 channels on the antenna.

Well something interesting happend, one of the husbands ran a home based business, and one of his problems was organization. The other spouse that was traded for the week helped him organize it and showed him how important it was to not loose important papers.

Well the same goes for online work. And today I’m going to let you in on a little secret to how I get organized with my email, and keep important emails. Before I do - a quick disclaimer: I’m still not completely organized, and still loose things occasionally.

The idea is simple: Keep your inbox clean and keep your important emails available. With Gmail it is incredibly easy!

Starring Important Emails
With Gmail’s star feature, you can simply star any emails that are clients asking for work, or people asking for more information. These contacts you DONT want to lose! If you get stuck in working on what you are doing today, you’ll find yourself in a week with no work. So you must keep in touch and not loose the contacts.

Archiving Read Emails
I get a boat load of email every day. Some of it is automated, some of it is payment notifications, and yes spam. The first thing I do each day is scan for spam in my inbox, and mark it as spam. Next I start from the top and just keep reading each email until I get to the end. And replying if neccessary.

Remember to star each important email! Then when I’ve read all the emails, I view the inbox, and I use the select unstarred link, and archive all those emails. Then all that is left is the important emails. The ones that are future prospects, I’ll review from time to time and if neccessary send them an email. But for the most part, I’ll leave them there until I can work on it.

As I complete the work for clients, I simply unstar those emails. This way they leave the inbox clear for the next client. It can become stressfull seeing a large number of starred important emails you need to get to, but overall it is worth doing. You DONT want to lose a client!

Finding Lost Emails
And finally, if you are using Gmail as your email client - You’ll be able to find lost emails very quickly. The searching capabilities of it makes it very good for finding lost clients or emails containing information you need for a project, but can’t find!