Organization Archives

I’m trying to get past my compulsion to make sure my Google Reader is cleaned out every day. I have a lot of blogs that I like to check in, but there just isn’t enough time every day to read them all! Before, I’d often just skip posts or mark them as read, just to get that unread number down to zero.

So now, I’ve created a “Read Daily” folder of the blogs that I want to make sure I read every day. The rest I read when I have time, or when they are particularly relevant:

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Like my email, I have folders that I want to clear out weekly and monthly. My plan is to go through these on Friday afternoons or the weekend — times when things are winding down or when I can settle on the couch with a movie and my laptop.

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Screen shot 2013 01 25 at 4 21 50 PM

Two weeks ago, I cleaned out all of my email inboxes and rearranged how I am sorting things. (I’ve dug up some old posts for reference: Be a GMail Superstar, Parts 1 and 2.) I’m still using stars, multiple inboxes and filters, but my inboxes have changed. Now, they go:

Yellow stars: Respond within 48 hours
Green stars: Respond within the week
Purple stars: Take care of sometime this month
Blue stars: Reference emails
Orange stars: Healthy Living Summit (because we’re fully into 2013 planning mode!)

I take some time every afternoon to respond to the yellow starred emails. Every few days, I skim through the green stars (“Respond within the week”) to see what needs to be moved to the yellow folder (“Respond within 48 hours”), and I completely clean that one out at the end of each week. Similarly, the monthly inbox gets reviewed each week, and completely cleared at the end of the month.

Filters, stars and multiple inboxes are your friends. Don’t be afraid to use them!