I’ll be honest. I’m not a fan of email. It is the largest work-related time-waster I’ve encountered, and it is often misused as a communication medium. So anything I can do to speed up and/or simplify my email life is good in my book. Unfortunately, I’m also an archivaholic–always afriad I’ll delete something important. So here’s how I’ve simplified my email workflow to automatically archive my email correspondence.
Three steps to saving time by auto-archiving your sent emails:
First, watch Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero, if you have not already. Create a single folder called ARCHIVE, and dump all of your saved messages there. Don’t worry–if you need something, you can search for it. It will take less time to search for it than it will to hunt it in an exhaustive directory structure.
Second, make sure that your email automatically “quotes” any emails that you reply to. This is a default setting in most email clients.
Third, change your account settings to send all sent messages to ARCHIVE:
That’s it. Now you can delete messages in your inbox that you have replied to, because they’ll be quoted in your response that is in ARCHIVE. You also don’t have to worry about “saving” your sent messages because they’ll automatically go to the ARCHIVE. Your entire email correspondence is now in one auto-archived, easy to search folder.
