You might need to get email off of your server. The first is space. If your company has quotas on how big your email boxes can be (and they all do), you might find yourself in a situation where you have no more room, but you need to hang onto emails for legal or documentation reasons. So what do you do?

So you can either go through each email, either printing it to paper or file, or you can do the easy method if your company uses Outlook. Today I’ll show you the easy way.

Email Archives

I have never figured out why so many companies are stingy when it comes to disk space on their email servers. Disk space is cheap, after all.

Now I know there are people out there who save everything. That isn’t necessary, and it shouldn’t be a reason to use this method. Clean up your email first.

But if you have a legitimate need to preserve email, such as for documenting processes and decisions, saving them off the server can free up space while still keeping the emails for you to access.

Email As Legal Grounds

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this method could be used to pull email off the server into a file, which could then be transported to another system or computer.

However, I do want to point out that email is generally considered company property, and it may or may not be legal to remove email from the computer systems the company owns and put it on another machine. I cannot be held responsible if you decide to follow this method for such ends.

Outlook To The Rescue

Most companies use Outlook. It’s an industry standard, and it’s been around for ages. No matter how old the Outlook is that your company uses, this will work. It may not be in the exact same place in the menus, but the functionality is there. If you can’t find the options where I say they are, Google it. Google will provide exact locations based on your program year.

Here are the steps:

Creating a Separate PST File

Outlook stores email in PST files. The default one is what you generally use, but you can set up other PST files and store them on your hard drive. You can copy or move any email to the PST file.

Copy The Emails

Once you have the PST file set up, copy over emails. You can arrange them in folders or just leave them all in one pile.

Disconnect the PST

Once you are done, you can close the PST in Outlook if you really don’t need to access them frequently. If you need to access those emails again, you can open the PST file and they are there.

I can’t really say whether closing or leaving it open is better. But you have to be aware that those emails won’t be accessible anywhere that can’t get to the PST file. So if you are using Outlook from a remote machine, you will not be able to access the file on your hard drive – any more than you could access a document you stored locally. If you need it from multiple locations, consider putting the PST file on the network.

The Video

I decided this would be best shown by video. So here is my Outlook 2010 setting up the files.
https://youtu.be/FJoLeGaWJ08

Summary

Using PST files to pull email out of your email server is a good way to archive them.

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You probably know that you have to hang onto certain paper documents for a given number of years. These documents are required by law, and only after a certain number of years of retention can you get rid of them. The same applies to email, though, which has been used in court cases. But how long do you have to keep the email from Great Aunt Edna talking about the snowstorm? That’s where setting up an email retention schedule comes in. You can clean your old email with email retention policies.

I get a lot of email every day. If I didn’t delete most of it outright, I would have overrun my email capacity years ago. But there are some things I need to hang on to for various reasons. I need to be able to reference all Girl Scout correspondence until the next membership year. I need to be able to refer to my Girl Scout training records forever. I need to hang onto tax receipts for 7 years. But what about the other? That’s where I set my retention rules. If I didn’t have them, “out of sight, out of mind” would definitely apply, and my mailbox would be unwieldly.

Disclaimer: Let me state outright I am not a lawyer, and I base this information on what I have found on the web. Research and use retention schedules based on your country’s laws, or consult a professional

Company Retention Times

All companies should have an email retention schedule. It’s a legal rule. If you have any questions about how long your email is retained, please contact your employer’s IT department. But know that your email is retained for many years.

Personal Retention Times

As a starting point, I found documents from two companies whose business is retention. The first one, Intradyn, specializes in email. The second, Shred-it, specializes in papeer documents. Both of these companies are US based, and follow US law.

Intradyn: Comprehensive Guide To Email Retention Policy

Figure out how long you need to keep your own email before disposing of it.

Deleting Email At The End of Retention

If you classify your email correctly at the outset, deleting email that doesn’t need to be retained is a snap.

Using Labels/Categories

You can set up your retention at the point of receipt to make things easier. I have a simple scheme: I mark things for permanent retention and deletion after a time.

In GMail, I use the label “PermRet” to indicate something that needs to be permanently retained. Anything that has to be retained to a date, I mark with the year: “Ret17”, “Ret18” etc. The digits represent the year in which something can be deleted

In Outlook, I use categories. Since I don’t like cluttering up my categories list, I use two: “PermRet” and “Retain”. Then I use the searches to help me figure out what has to be deleted from the Retain tag every year.

Using Searches to Find Old Email

You can use the search function to find old email to classify it.

In Gmail, use the Before search keyword (note the special format of the date: Year/Month/Day)

In Outlook use the Advanced search

Using Filters/Rules To Delete

Once you have your labels or tags set up, it becomes very easy to find those items for deletion. In Gmail you can make a search using the tag: keyword.

Outlook you can use the advanced search

Further Automation

There are ways to further automate this process using Google Scripts (Gmail) and VBA (Outlook). However, that is way beyond the scope of this article. If you are programmer-minded, you can find examples on how to locate email with specific dates and label/category combinations.

Summary

With a few simple searches and judicious application of labels/categories, you can set up your email to have a retention date. This will keep your mailbox cleaner, and make sure you only keep the important stuff.

Image by Beverly Pearl. Licensed under Creative Commons. Text added.

It’s almost reflexive. You pick up your phone and you immediately check your email. The question I want to look at today is about checking email too much…and a better way.

I’ve had a terrible email habit. I think it stemmed from FOMO, but I would check my email around 20 times a day. Waiting in line? Check my email. Cooking dinner? Check my email. Walking the dog? Check my email. And even though I would act on those emails immediately, by filing, deleting or sending to my task system, I knew that I was still taking far too much time with email. It had become a bad habit to constantly check.

What Happens When You Check Too Much

Email is a funny thing. It has expanded from an easier way to communicate into a way to have others push tasks onto you.

Think about the last few emails you received that you didn’t delete or file. That means you either have to respond or do something in response to the email. Ask yourself if you would have taken the same action if the person had asked you in person.

Think about this: if the woman at your kid’s school had asked you in the parking lot if you could make cupcakes for the end of the week, would you have said yes? Maybe, but you would have thought about it.

If it comes in an email, however, we lose two things: we lose that pause where we consider the task and decide what to do based on our current time; and we respond without considering the assumption that an email implies you will already do the task.

Email assumes we will comply, and without conscious effort, we do comply.

What Is Too Much

So often is too much?

The best way to judge is to ask yourself if you have time at the moment to take care of the email, either by filing, deleting, responding, or pushing to an outside system.

If you don’t have time to deal with the email — and by this I mean think about it and consider if you have time to do the tasks — don’t check it.

Email: The Electronic Child

If you have kids, you’ll understand this reference. Email is the kid tugging at your sleeve, constantly asking for something. And as any parent knows, if you spend all your time responding to that sleeve tugging, you do two things: you reinforce the behavior, and you get nothing else done.

Kids beg/nag because we let them. Email begs/nags because we let it. We let our minds engage with it, even without considering what we need to do.

10 and 2 (and 6)

So what’s a better way?

First of all, don’t check your email first thing. That is equivalent to letting a bunch of people ask you for things before you even had a chance to settle in and see where you are for the day.

I suggest picking set times to check your email.

I’m currently teaching my daughter to drive, and I remind her that she needs to have both hands on the wheel – 10 and 2. It’s a good time to check email as well. 10 lets you settle into your day before dealing with the tasks others are piling on; 2 lets you deal with anything truly urgent before you leave for the day. And I add in 6 for checking personal email.

Three times only instead of reflexive checking.

Summary

Save yourself blindly taking on things that others dump on you. Limit how often you check your email, and check it when you have the time to really think about the request. You’ll be amazed at the results.

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“I haven’t gotten to the email yet.” The woman’s voice was annoyed. I had called because I needed to know if she was able to come to speak to my Girl Scouts or not, something we had arranged two months before, and I had followed up with an email three weeks ago. “But I sent the email three weeks ago.” Her voice had angry now. “Listen, I have thousands of emails in my inbox. I can’t get to everything the minute it comes in.” I was stunned. I thanked her for her time, let her know that we would have to reschedule and hung up. Thousands of emails. And she was still trying to get to them all.

About a year later, I wandered over to my client manager’s desk. I had a changes to go into a release, and she hadn’t responded to the system emails asking for her approval. It was the first week of January, and the fix needed to be in the next week. “Oh, I deleted all my emails on January 2nd. I had almost 10,000, and I decided that I just needed to get rid of them because I wasn’t going to get through them.” And in the meantime, changes critical for the users were left undone as we scrambled to resubmit all the changes to the system.

So what should you do when your email is completely out of control? Ignore the incoming? Delete everything? Or something else? Today we will look at how to reset your email when you have lost control of your email inbox.

The Dangers Of Trying To Catch Up

So many people will keep trying to catch up on their email, even under the onslaught. But the truth is, if more is coming in than you are taking out, you will never be caught up, and the problem keeps growing.

Even working from the most recent doesn’t solve the problem. No matter where you start working, some email will be ignored, and emails will be left unattended.

The Dangers Of The Grand Delete

At the same time, deleting everything can remove important information.

This isn’t FOMO (fear of missing out) speaking. There are often legitimately important things in your email that you need to pull out. This could include receipts for taxes, registration information for conferences or exams, tickets or correspondence that needs to be preserved (more about this later this month). Email is considered legal information, and you can’t just delete it outright.

A Better Approach To Resetting Your Email

So there’s a better way to approach getting your email under control. It’s sort of a hybrid strategy that takes a multi-pass approach to weeding out the inbox.

Get It Out Of The Way

The first thing you need to do is get everything out of your inbox. But you won’t be deleting it. You’ll be putting it in a folder where you can deal with it. I suggest calling it “backlog” so you don’t forget what it is for.

This leaves your inbox to accept only the newest email so you can deal with the most current issues, while still giving you the opportunity to access your old email.

Search It

Next you will do some broad passes through the email.

First, find everything that has the word “unsubscribe” in it. All email that is sent from email broadcasts in the US is required to have a clear unsubscribe function. This is usually the word “unsubscribe”. So you will search your email, and delete everything that came from a broadcast.

Next, find everything that has “receipt” in it. All of these will be put into a folder you will call “receipts”. This allows you to keep anything that you may need for taxes. Also search for “contribution” and add that to the receipts.

Next, find all email where you are just CCed and not the recipient. These emails are generally meant for your information, but you can deal with them later. (In Gmail, this is simply cc:me) Put these into another folder called “CC”. Do this for all email you are BCCed on (in Gmail, bcc:me)

Next, pull everything that has an attachment into a folder. These might be unimportant, but chances are if someone took the time to send you a file, you need to look at it a little bit closer.

Lastly, make sure conversations are turned on. Most email programs have a way to show conversations or threads. This will group the email so that you can deal with it in related clumps.

Sort It

Your backlog should be substantially reduced now. The next thing you need to do is look at the various things shown by sorting the email.

Sort your email by date. How old is the oldest email? Is the oldest email read and just hanging out? Or is it unread? Delete as much of the oldest email as you can.

Sort your email by sender. Do you recognize everyone? See if you can delete email from people you’ve never heard of. (If you use Outlook, this is really easy – just click on the sender column header, but Gmail takes a bit more work to do this; Google it).

Bit By Bit

Now that the bulk of your email has been put aside, you need to go through the rest. Do it in 10- or 15-minute increments, and use a timer!

There are four possibilities for every email: file as reference material, take action outside of email, respond or delete. Don’t let any email under your mouse get skipped; process all as they fall.

Keeping Your Email Clean

So we’ve talked about getting out of the hole. But how do you stop falling into it to begin with? It’s by applying those four actions to every email that comes into your box.

The difference is that you can set up rules/filters to run on your current inbox to help keep it clean. You can use the same filters above to automatically file your email. For instance, you could have everything with an unsubscribe button go into a separate folder, and then clean that folder out once a week, either by reading or deleting.

Summary

As tempting as it is to keep working through an overwhelming inbox or deleting it outright, these methods aren’t good approaches. Instead, by putting it in its own folder, filtering out newsletters and other email, and then sorting it, you can reduce the input so it is manageable.

My EBook On Email Taming

Want a complete system on how to manage email? Check out my e-workbook, Taming the Gmail Dragon!

Image by thinkhere. Licensed under Creative Commons. Text added.

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The calendar is one of the basic tools of any time management and productivity strategy. Yet people don’t use them to their full potential. These dos and don’ts of calendar use will help you get the most out of your calendar – or get you started on the right path.

Using a calendar is second nature to me. But in the past few weeks, I have run into three people who didn’t use them: one because she felt she didn’t need to (and consequently missed two appointments with me) and two people who admitted they didn’t know where to start. This article is for you, my friends.

What A Calendar Is For

Calendars are a place to record commitments you have made that will take place at a given date and time. They manage our fixed commitments so that we may fill in the rest of the things we need to do around them.

The calendar should give you, at a glance, a feel for how open or busy your day is. Consulting the calendar should be the first step in deciding if your current commitment level allows you to take on something new. It should be the first stop in making any other time commitment.

And you should honor every appontment on that calendar, even if the appointment is to your spouse, children or yourself.

Types of Calendars

There are many types of calendars out there, ranging from electronic to paper.

Most electronic calendars allow you to enter the information pertinent to the appointment and then let you switch between views to see month, week or day.

Paper calendars come in every form, from the little pocket ones my grandmother carried to the free wall calendars to the detailed hour-by-hour appointment books used by busy professionals.

Google “electronic calendar” or “paper calendar” or “printable calendar” and you will see the options availble to you.

Do’s and Don’ts

OK, you’ve chosen a calendar. Where do you start?

Do consult it every time you make an appointment, or don’t make the appointment.

Calendars can stop you from double-booking yourself: but only if you consult it before making an appointment.

You may not want to always carry your calendar with you; but if you don’t, don’t make any appointment until you can check it. If this is the case, tell the person you will get back to them to confirm your appointment…and write down the information so you can check!

Do enter as much detail as you can, using descriptive names.

Sometimes it is OK to write down a single word to capture what will happen at an appointment, such as “dentist”. That tells you where you need to be and what you need to bring.

However, for most things that go on the calendar, you will have to specify where the appointment will be as well as a brief description of what you will be dong. You can use this information to prepare for the appointment, gathering all your materials, reviewing items that were sent out, or preparing a list of questions or a presentation. There are few appointments outside of social occasions that you can go without any thought or preparaton.

Don’t put other information in your calendar like notes and tasks.

Most electronic calendars have sections for you to record notes about your appointment, and to record things that you need to do that came up during the appointment. Even paper planners sometimes have space for these things.

Do not give into the temptation to use them.

A calendar is meant to manage time- and date-based appointments. It is not the best place to record tasks or notes. The reason is simple: if you scatter your tasks and notes all over the place, how are you going to find them again? (And don’t tell me search, because I know how well search works…)

Instead, have a system for taking all of your notes, so you only have to look in one place. Have a system to manage all your tasks for the same reason.

And if you try to tell me it’s OK because you will remember, I will tell you you won’t remember. If you try to tell me that you need to maintain the connection to the appointment in your notes or tasks, I will tell you to transfer that information over to the notes/tasks system instead. Keep it all together. Make it simple.

Do have one calendar as source if you use multiple calendars

Our lives are more complicated than they used to be. My grandmother could manage with a purse-sized monthly calendar because she had few appointments, and my grandfather’s appointments were on there too.

In the today of busyness, we couldn’t use a purse calendar and capture everything. And if you are part of a family unit, you also need to have insight into what your family is doing. I need to know where my daughter needs to be for her performances, because she is not driving yet.

Each of us in our family has our own electronic calendar. But there are times when we need to see all the information in one place to coordinate the driving, so we have a paper calendar in our kitchen. It would be a nightmare if all us updated the electronic calendars and the paper calendars, because we wouldn’t know if everything on both was up to date. So we pick a source for each of us.

When you pick the source, you make sure all information gets entered into that one place. It can then be used to update the other places. Luckily, with an electronic calendar, that means that as soon as my husband puts something into his calendar, I see it. Same with my daughter. I can then update the paper calendar for an at-a-glance view.

Don’t pick a calendar format that doesn’t match the way you work

There are a few things a calendar needs to work best: it needs to be able to hold the quantity of appointments you have, and it needs to be with you all the time.

First the quantity. If your calendar has limited space, what do you do when you run out of space? If you can only have three appointments on your calendar, what do you do with the fourth? Most electronic calendars don’t have this problem, but paper ones do. If you are someone who has appointments every hour, you need enough space to capture an appointment every hour.

Second, having it with you. In this day of smart phones, most people have a calendar with them all the time. But if you aren’t on your computer much, and you don’t have a phone, an electronic calendar may not be the best choice. On the flip side, if you are always near your computer, or you have a phone you use heavily, a paper calendar might not be the best either.

Make sure you have your calendar with you, and that it has space to include all your appointments, and you minimize the risk of double-booking and missing appointments.

Do let the calendar do the work for you

A calendar is only as good as the information you put in. As we say in Information Technology: GIGO (garbage in, garbage out). Train yourself to use your calendar to record all your appointments.

Once you know that you have put everything in the calendar, let it work for you. Some electronic calendars will notify you when you have appointments coming up. If it is not disruptive to what you are doing, let it remind you so that you can do what you need to do before going.

But even if your calendar is not actively reminding you, look at it often enough to see what is coming. It will present the information you need to stay on target.

Summary

Calendars are a great tool to keep track of commitments that are time- and date-specific. Here are the dos and don’ts, summarized:

• Do consult it every time you make an appointment, or don’t make the appointment.
• Do enter as much detail as you can, using descriptive names.
• Don’t put other information in your calendar like notes and tasks.
• Do have one calendar as source if you use multiple calendars
• Don’t pick a calendar format that doesn’t match the way you work
• Do let the calendar do the work for you

Image by Andreanna Moya Photography. Licensed under Creative Commons. Text added.

Tell Your Time is a short and to-the-point book about a different approach to time management. It combines the roles of Covey with the Eisenhower Matrix to help you craft an approach that is flexible and focused.

This book, which is about 30 pages, is kept purposefully short because a book on time management shouldn’t suck up your time. It starts with a look at why most people don’t reach their goals, and moves on to a very specific method of getting he most of your time. Following the steps in this book can help you get clearer about what you are trying to do and how to accomplish this.

Going to Switzerland? Or Siberia?

The book starts out with an analogy. You want to go to Switzerland, but the terminal is a long walk and there are hours to wait. You see that the gate you are at is leaving right now. But it’s not going to Switzerland. You get on anyway, trading your planned trip for something here and now. Most people don’t reach their goals because they trade what they really want for the things right here, right now.

“Our problem is not so much a conscious choice to abandon our goal but an unconscious aversion to waiting and working.”

The Secret of Time Management

This isn’t really a secret, but it is something most people forget to take into account: “If you want to manage your time, the sum total hours of your daily activities should be less than twenty four.”

To which I say, no kidding. But yet I, and everyone else I know, tries to pack more than 24 hours into every day.

The great analogy of this system is looking at time like an envelope budget. You put all your money (or time) into specific envelopes. If you exceed in one envelope, you must either do without or take from another envelope.

She goes on to say “The stress associated with a too-full schedule has little do with time at all; it has everything to do with our choices.”

Making a Schedule

“Are your daily activities moving you toward where you want to be, or are you swept up in the tumult of your to-dos?”

This is a great question, but how do you know where you want to be? To this, Amy takes two staples of the productivity sphere and puts them together in a way I’ve never seen before.

Roles

This part is straight out of Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits: determining what roles you play in your life. This can include everything from spouse to working to parent to volunteer and more.

What Do I Want To Be?

At this point, most systems would have you figure out what you want to do in each area you identified. Instead, Amy asks you to identify what you want to be in the areas you identified. And from there you figure out what activities you can do weekly or daily that will help you achieve those qualities.

On the surface this seems like an easy exercise; it would be very easy to write down flippant items for each. However, if you take some time and really look at it, you might find some profound items that would generally not make it onto a task list.

Grid Them

This was unusual. Most of us are familiar with the Eisenhower matrix as a system of priorities for tasks. But Amy takes the grid and instead of urgent/non-urgent and important/unimportant, she uses negotiable/non-negotiable and flexible/inflexible in time.

For example, working hours (for most of us) would be non-negotiable and inflexible, putting the task in quadrant 1. Quadrant 2 becomes the place for non-negotiable and flexible things. These should be where most of your activity lies. This would be things like sleep, and where your role activities should live. Q3 and Q4 are the negotiable items.

I think this way of looking at activities can really help take the wheat fom the chaff.

Plot It

Once you have an idea of what you are doing and the negotiability of the time, you fill out a grid. This can be done in a spreadsheet and lets you have a visual representation of what your time will be allocated to.

I have found doing this grid helps me keep my schedul under control and allows me to have enough time to relax and unwind.

Reading Time

This is a very short book. It took me less than an hour to read, even with taking notes.

What You Can Do Right Now

One of the things that you could do right now is to apply the matrix to your current task list. See if looking at the negotiability/flexibility helps weed out some of your tasks.

Book Information

Book: Tell Your Time*
Author: Amy Lynn Andrews
ASIN: B005F0H7BK

There are two key components of being productive: doing tasks the right way, and doing the right tasks. The first is known as efficiency; the second is effectiveness. Today we will talk about how to manage your time effectively.

For too many years I approached time and tasks as my mother had shown me by example: you do all the tasks that need to be done. What I failed to realize is that her time structure as a stay-at-home mother was very different from mine as a working professional. Yes, we both had homes with the same tasks and a child to raise; but I had much less time every day that I could call my own. I have to use my time more effectively if I am going to get things done while still having a life.

What Is Effective?

Effective, according to Dictionary.com is “adequate to accomplish a purpose; producing the intended or expected result”.

If a task is not effective, it is not producing the desired results.

If you are want to ski down a hill, drinking hot chocolate will not get you to the bottom. Neither will sitting in a hot tub. But putting your skis on, getting on the lift and doing the skiing will.

Effective actions are those that move you directly toward the desired end goal.

How Do You Make Time Management Effective?

Being effective with time management is all about picking your battles. You have a limited amount of time; you need to pick the tasks that will move you toward your goal, and eliminate anything that doesn’t.

Once that initial culling of activities is done, you have to take it further: do the tasks that will move you furthest toward your goal, while leaving the tasks that give smaller returns for if you have time.

4 Ways to Manage Time Effectively

So pulling time management into your goals can help you become more effective – but only if you are using it properly. Here are 4 ways to manage your time effectively.

Know What Needs To Be Done

The first thing is that you have to know what needs to be done. This has an important corrolary: you also have to know what doesn’t need to be done.

Pareto’s 80/20 principle holds: 80% of your results are going to come from 20% of your effort. After that, you are facing diminishing returns. Do you really want to be putting in full effort to do something no one – including yourself – really cares about?

Get Rid of Unnecessary Appointments

I love meetings. No, actually I don’t. In fact I think them so little of value that I will ask the person inviting me to explain exactly why I am being invited. I once had a supervisor who implemented daily meetings to find out why we were so behind on a project (and I wish I were kidding, but I’m not)

So in order to make effective use of my time, I will ask what the goal of my being in the meeting is, and if I can do it some other way, I will do that. Many times an email or report will suffice and free me up to use my time elsewhere.

Sometimes this becomes about activities. We humans are creatures of habit, and we can be involved in things that no longer interest us or give us any benefit far longer than we realize. I believe it’s a good idea to go through your calendar once a year and see what has crept in and what doesn’t serve you.

You might be surprised at what you find.

Know How Long Things Take

Most people that I know seriously underestimate how long things take in general. They might be a wizard at doing it in their job, but be abysmal at home tasks or commute time. While I can give a very accurate estimate of how long any given programming task will be, I still routinely underestimate how long I need to complete personal projects and tasks at home.

Without that accurate sense of timing, you can’t manage your time effectively. You will either end up wasting large chunks of time from underestimating, or not have enough time to complete what you set out to do.

If you overestimate how long things take, you will be tempted to either push off the following tasks as you complete the one you are doing, or leave a task undone, causing double set-up time.

Don’t Overload

Those of us that need time management need it because we don’t have enough time to accomplish everything we want to. This is true whether your are a CEO, working parent or retired person. Unfortunately, I rarely get to talk to anyone who doesn’t try to cram as much as possible into that time.

Effective time management means that you leave time in your schedule for transitioning between activities (like driving to the next appointment). It also means leaving time in your schedule as a buffer for when things don’t go according to plan (like always). And last, it means leaving time in your schedule to relax and unwind.

Overloading on tasks is a sure path to burnout, which sends effective time usage out the window, so be careful!

Summary

Effective time management means that you use your time to do the right things. Paring down tasks, cutting unnecessary appointments, knowing how longs things take and being careful not to overload yourself are the pillars to being effective.

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