HuffPo posted an article yesterday entitled “Five Easy Steps  To Email Organization.” It’s just the latest of about a bazillion similar articles that have crossed my screen over the last year or three.

All due respect to the article’s author Karen Leland, a best-selling time-management expert, but organizing email isn’t the issue. That’s the easiest thing in the world. Wanna sort your email by subject or sender or search for specific phrases in your inbox so you can subsequently sort them? No problem: Any of that can be done with an easy click.

The real issue is dealing with the email once you have it organized: reading it, deciding what doesn’t require a response, responding to the rest and making sure nothing important is falling through the cracks.

I don’t know that there are any “easy steps” for dealing with email. At some point, you just have to dig in and read and respond. It’s called work, and while everybody does it a little differently, a new filing method isn’t going to make all that work go away.

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 10:02 am and is filed under This 'n' That.