Emails are become an important part of our daily life. Almost everyone use internet today and has an email id. I have two email ids. One for my personal use and another for my office work related use. The most important thing is that we should organize our emails, so that we can find the right email in right time with minimum effort.

Why we should organize?

Emails has importance in our life. Weather you are using your email for personal or official use, it has importance. For example in my personal mail I have all emails which are not directly related to my employer’s work and in my official mail all are direct related to my employer’s work. Importance depends on the email message. Some emails are sent direct to me, some are CC. The main thing is that it holds important documents which may be useful to find out in crucial moment for us. So why not make our inboxes a little organize?

How to organize?

Weather you are using Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail or something else, almost every one has some option to organize emails. I use http://outlook.com (This is a new email service from Microsoft) for my personal use and Gmail for official use. I found two common method to organize emails in this two very popular email services. You can organize emails in two methods.

• Folders
• Labels / Categories.

The purpose to use folder is the same as our personal file storing in hard disk for example. You can create different folders and store your emails inside that. The other option is to use labels / categories. I like the labels / categories, because it is more flexible and real world concept than folders. You can set more that labels to a particular email. But in the other hand you can store an email inside only one folder. Try to sort out how you will organize your emails. My opinion is, divide your main work and create a category for them. Then for every main category create some sub categories and so on. Do not make your categories holding too few emails then it will confusing with the increasing number of categories. At the same time do not make them holding many unrelated emails.

How I am organizing?

There is no nested category creation in outlook.com. So all my categories are root label. Some are created by outlook.com automatically. These are general like, ‘document’, ‘family’, ‘important’ etc. and some are created by me like the emails related to travel should store under ‘Travel’ category.

For my official mail I divide categories depending on the varies projects on which I am working. Then sub categories them with some nested categories. All the same type of emails should go under a category.

If you are not organizing then please make some time and organize them. Also please tell your story, how you organize your important stuff.