Do You Have Rules for Your Email?

Sarah over at the BeTuitive blog talks about how her email can distract her from her task at hand. She questions whether or not to disable her email auto-notifier. This is a dilemma for everyone who is trying to maintain a balance of productivity and responsiveness to requests from customers, coworkers and friends and family.

So what's your strategy for handling your email? Are you a piler or a filer? Do you keep it all in one pile in your inbox or do you automatically route incoming email into prioritized sub-folders?

Want to be able to see at a glance if you have mail from a customer? Want to sort your opt-in email marketing from your coworkers requests? Want to have a special place to keep email from your kids?

You could simply set up some folders and manually move messages from your inbox or you could spend a few minutes to learn how to use the Rules function of your email client.

Rules will automatically move, copy, highlight, even respond to incoming email based on user definable attributes of incoming mail. You can set up a folder for your coworkers that routes all mail from them into one particular folder. You may even want messages from your boss to be highlighted to grab your attention. You may want messages from customers to remain in your inbox awaiting a priority response. You may want these messages highlighted and copied to a folder for archiving.

The email processing rules function of your existing email client can be a great productivity tool that can increase your responsiveness to customers, coworkers, friends and family.