Thursday, June 4, 2009

Carla’s easy steps to organising your emails

This evening, my wonderful readers, I am going to share with you my amazing steps for effectively managing your emails. You will read them. You will be amazed. You will wonder ‘how did I ever effectively reply to my emails before?’

Firstly, have an email account. Receive some emails. Then follow these easy steps.

1. Decide if it is something which needs deleting (the ads for websites you don’t recall joining, and really must remember to ask to be deleted from their customer list so as to avoid future spam mail… opps it’s deleted. What was the website again? Decide to deal with it next time you receive spam. Repeat ad nauseam)
2. Decide if it is a keeper, whether it needs to be replied to or filed away. Keep going back and forth on this point. Create new folders specifically for storing emails you wish to keep under descriptive headings. Change your mind and decide maybe you should reply. Leave email in inbox until a year later. When you delete it.
3. Decide if it is a replier. This is an email you have received from a dear friend or family member which has really cheered you up, made your day, or just has a question which needs replying to. In this case, further steps need to be taken:
A. Feel so happy all day said friend/family member has thought of you and taken the time to write to you. Decide this requires a specially thought out email in reply. Decide to take your time to make this email particularly special.
B. Spend a few days wondering how to make said email especially special
C. Worry about the fact it’s been a few days and you still haven’t replied. Now the reply email must be extra especially special.
D. Realise it’s been at least a week and you haven’t replied to any emails. By now are likely in the middle of some illness/flare of illness, and promise yourself the email you send will be so fantastically wonderful it will make up for further delay due to your illness.
E. Two weeks later reply to the email. Apologise for delay. Email is not special or exciting, but now at least the other person knows you haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth. And you aren’t ignoring them.
F. Receive a reply to your reply. Repeat steps A-F.

Really though, I love getting emails. And blog comments. I’m endevouring to answer my comments too, and just a heads up I am doing this in the comments section. I just now realized how silly this may be, as if you leave a comment do you then go back and read other comments? Trying to come up with a better system than this.

Or in true procrastinator style, I am planning to plan a better system than this.

2 comments:

  1. Carla, this post confirms that we are, indeed, kindred spirits. I could have written this post myself because I do this very thing. However, I've added one additional step. To make up for the delay in my email response, I not only aspire to compose a fantastically wonderful email, but I also plan, if the person lives in my area, to bake them something special. This never happens. Well, maybe I did it once.

    Thank you for your kind words concerning the 100 Things list. Sharing ideas is always fun!

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  2. It's funny that you mention that you reply to the comments in the comments, because I realised that you could be doing that as I was opening up your page today and went back to your last blog to see if you'd said anything. Then I read it in this blog.

    Spooky.

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