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The previous post in this series discussed how emailing others only when absolutely necessary, can help you save your own time with email. This post, brings to light, the downside of using email folders as a time-saving tool.

Tip 4: Folders aren't really as helpful as you think

Always thought email folders aided good email management? Here's news for you - folders are more a hurdle than help.

At first glance it may seem logical to neatly stack away your emails into designated folders that you can make a beeline for, when you need to find something. But more often than not, your emails will fall into categories that merit filing in more than one folder.

For example, let's say you have a folder called "Boss" and another called "Invoices". This works well for you as you head to the "Boss" folder to find all emails from your supervisor and to the "Invoices" folder for all emails with invoices from your vendors. But then one day, your boss forwards some invoices that he would like you to process. Now where do these go? You probably make a decision at that moment and stash them away in one of the two folders. But a while later if you were to search for this particular invoice, we guarantee you won't find it easily. Now imagine what can happen with emails that fall into several filing categories!

So your best bet would be to consider not using a folder structure at all for email management.

A study by IBM found that people spend almost one minute each time they go through their folders to find a message, compared to 17 seconds using the native email search function. Even better, get yourself a good search Add-in that will cut your email search time even more significantly and let go of folders for good.

Psst! Looking for a good search Add-In that can help you out of the folder mess? Click here to get FewClix today!