The Deleted Items Folder is a Rubbish Bin and Not a Filing Cabinet

In my last post I wrote about a very simple email stress management technique … move emails out of your Inbox once you have finished with them. But where should the emails be moved to?

I'll discuss a few ideas during the week but for starters …

DON'T FILE YOUR EMAILS IN THE DELETED ITEMS FOLDER!

The Deleted Items folder is your electronic rubbish bin … do you file your important papers in your physical rubbish bins.

I have actually had customers who (used to) delete emails to remove them from their Inbox …. and later look in the Deleted Items folder when they needed to find an important email.

The Deleted Items folder is your electronic rubbish bin! Like it’s physical counterpart, the Deleted Items folder can be emptied very easily causing permanent loss of your “filed” emails.

If you're not going to refer to the email again and do not need to keep it (for legal reasons etc) then DELETE IT!

Otherwise you need to move it out of the Inbox and into either:

1. One folder in which you file all your emails. (Give this email a generic name like Filing or Old Emails) or
2. Individual folders dedicated to projects, cases, clients, topics etc.

I'll talk more about each of these two methods later this week.