Contacts, email, calendars...managing the virtual clutter in our lives

When we think of clutter, we usually think of the clutter that we can visually see, but in our device driven lives, virtual clutter is taking over.  Here are some tips to help you tame the virtual clutter in your life. 

1) Syncing up your devices

If you have more than one cell phone, one for work and one for personal you have a special challenge with keeping information that is stored in both devices in sync.  If you change the email address for a contact in one device, do you remember to change it in the 2nd device?  If possible, having just one device is the answer.  If that’s not possible try to segregate the information so that each contact is only stored in one device.

There are “cloud” based services like Apple’s Cloud service that keeps all of your devices in sync.  Making it much easier to maintain your current information.

2) Email Management

Email can be a special challenge and a time consumer.  It is a necessary communication medium.  The best way to manage your email inbox is to seek to keep the number of unread messages to a medium.  Set aside time each day, whether it be 15 minutes multiple times during the day, or a block of time at the beginning and ends of the day, to monitor and respond to your emails.  Resist the urge to check it constantly all day long, as this can decrease your productivity and time to get other things done.  

The key to managing your email is to have a system for what to do with every type of email you receive.  

• answering questions, provding information
• responding to requests for your service or product
• information that you may need in the future
• email threads related to current situations
• events and invitation information

Each type of email requires you to have a system for handling them so that you can easily and efficiently deal with each one and get through your inbox.  

• answering questions, provding information - ithe best f you can immediately respond and be done with the email and delete it
• responding to requests for your service or product - if this requires some research or additional information gathering get the process started and then put the email in a folder labeled something like “open requests” or “pending proposals”... whatever applies for you.  Then when you have the information ready to get back to the sender, you will know where the original email is.  If you need a reminder add it to your calendar or To Do list.  
• information that you may need in the future - if you have a lot of these types of emails you will want to create themed folders to keep them, your themes could be things like “competitors”, “trends”, “websites”, etc. If you don’t have alot of these, you could just label the folder “information”. 
• email threads related to current situations - create a folder with a label with the customer’s name or project’s name
• events and invitation information - create a folder called “events”, if you have a lot of emails related to a particular event then you might need individual folders for different events

The goal with your email is to keep the number of emails in your inbox to a minimum.  Some companies have storage limits that limit the number of emails you can have in your inbox, so its a good practice to have a system for dealing with them and make it easy to retreive an email that you may need later.  

3) Contacts

Our contact lists are one of the most important assets we have to maintain.  We collect business cards, peoples names and numbers and its important to have an easy to use system to maintain this information so we can access it when we need it.  

There are so many free business card reader apps available, I just heard about Cam Card for example.  Some of them will scan directly into your contacts database other just take a picture of the card and you will need to input the information manually.  

If you have a pile of cards, snippets of information, pieces of paper with an email or phone number set aside some time whether its 15 minutes a day, or an hour on the weekend to get all of that information input into whatever system you use for your contacts so you can throw away that pile eventually.  

Finally, if you want some help getting started or getting it all under control, give us a call or email here at Let’s Get Organized!  brenda@letsgetorganized.org or 612,385.6916.