I am a professional freelance writer and business consultant. I work out of my home office for my own business, but my wife works out of her home office sometimes for her full-time corporate job, so I know what it feels like for both types of home office worker. One of the ways we are alike is that home office workers can easily be overwhelmed by email.
It isn't surprising when you think about it. A quick 30 second conversation that may have taken place in person becomes an email. The pleasant, "Hey, how was your trip to Florida," you normally have in
the breakroom, becomes an email. If you have more than one email account (and who doesn't) it can be especially tough because now you have to not only manage all of the messages, but all of the accounts too.
I've been trying out various email tools to help handle this issue, most recently the Zimbra Desktop. But, there is still one issue that needs tweaking. When I start my day, I need to see ALL my email inboxes so that I know what is going on. Is there an urgent issue sitting in email account number one? Is there something that needs an answer by 8:00am in email account number two? Sure, I can click each email account one by one, but if my potential fire is in email account number three and I'm reading about Betty's vacation in email account number two, we have a problem.
The surprisingly easy solution is not more software, but rather, one more email account.
Step 1:
Create a new email account, Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, your own, whatever.
Step 2:
Set all of your other email accounts to forward a copy of every message to the new account.
Step 3:
There is no step 3. You're Done. Trust me, it works.
Now, all of your email is in one place. Not only is it in one place, but it is in chronological order. You can work backwards or forwards, whichever you prefer. Even better, the messages marked urgent are at the top, no matter what email account they came from! So, your critical problems are your first stop no matter where they came from.
There is one catch. You can't reply or answer emails from this account. If you do, someone will hit the reply button and your email will come here, not to your seperate accounts like you want. The best way to handle this is to disable the ability to send email from this account. If it is your own email host, then you can just make the setting to not allow email to be sent. If it is not your own email host, then all you have to do is not setup the outgoing mail settings in your email software. No SMTP server, no sent email. (Just make sure you get an error message so you don't think you already sent your email.
You might be thinkning that this will just give you more email to manage. In a way, you are right, and that is what kept me from trying this approach for so long. But, there are two things to keep in mind. First, your Mega-Forward email account is not your real email, it is just all of your emails listed in one place. So, you can delete emails from your Mega-Forward account without thinking twice about it because the original email is still back in your other account. Second, you would be surprised at how easily you can glance at a subject and time and know that you've already read that email before. Just use the checkboxes, or SHIFT-CLICK to select all the messages you've already taken care of and delete them when you get back into your original email accounts.
If you are still concerned, use my approach. I use my Mega-Forward account each morning to get a feel for my day. Then, I know where to go from there and which accounts have email that need my attention and in which order. Once I'm there, I delete all the messages in the Mega-Forward account and only work with the "real" messages. Then, throughout the day, I use my regular email accounts to handle business. When I get ready to end my day, or leave the office for a meeting or lunch, I log back into the Mega-Forward account and delete everything that is in the Inbox. After all, I've already handled those messages in their home accounts. All I need is to know what comes in starting now.
Then, when I get back to work, I repeat the process.
As a double secret bonus, I just check the Mega-Forward account from my cell phone when I'm out and about. That way, I can get a quick status report with just a glance at one account. If you setup your Mega-Forward account with IMAP you can even delete the messages as you read them so that they don't need going through again when you get back to the office since you already have a copy in another email box.
Try it out and I think you'll find it to be surprisingly helpful and easy to manage
. Best of all, you have one less piece of software to download, configure, and update on your laptop, desktop, and cell phone!