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Do you take pride in your hyper-organized mailbox? Do you spend time filing away every single email that drops into your inbox? Perhaps all the folders and mail rules that you created, give you a sense of control over your mailbox? Well, we ‘re sorry to burst your bubble but the truth is that any control you think you have over your mailbox because you organized it, is only an illusion. In reality you are expending time and effort on an activity that will waste more of your time and lower your productivity in the future.

You don't have to take our word for it. Take IBM's instead. After analyzing 345 users and their 85,000 instances of hunting through old email to find something they wanted, a 2011 IBM study found that people who did NOT organize their mailboxes found what they were looking for, faster than those who did!

Not only did the "non-organizers" save time by not creating folders, but they also found what they needed in a cinch by simply using their email client's search function. The "organizers" on the other hand, not only spent time creating folders and filing away their stuff either manually or via mail rules, but also took much longer to figure out where they had put what, when required to find something.

According to the authors of the IBM research paper mentioned above, "...despite people's reliance on email, fundamental aspects of its usage are still poorly understood. People who create complex folders indeed rely on these for retrieval, but these preparatory behaviors are inefficient and do not improve retrieval success." Simply put, filing your email in folders does not help you find them faster!

In fact, if you have been carefully filing away your emails regularly, you may soon find that you have set yourself up to spend more time than you need to with your mailbox, when you need to find something. For instance, you may realize that an invoice forwarded by your boss, may have been filed in either the "Boss" folder or the "Invoices" folder. Or a sales report sent by your colleague Tom, may have been filed under a folder named "Tom" or one named "Reports". So you see, compared with those who do not file their emails at all, you have simply been increasing the number of folders in which you will have to look if you need to retrieve a specific message.

So is the solution to let all hell break free in your folder-free inbox? Clearly, no. An intelligent way of resolving the issue of being unable search effectively in a cluttered mailbox, would be to opt for an Add-In that can do all the work for you. That way, you can find anything you want in seconds and you never have to organize your folders or create a single mail rule again!

Click here to get the FREE FewClix Personal Edition and stay in control of your mailbox without deleting or filing away a single email!