E-mail organization and you

As Rose-Hulman students, one of the top pet peeves developed among freshmen and seniors alike is an overcrowded inbox via Microsoft Outlook. For the standard student, the “Inbox is over its size limit” message has shown up once if not twenty times, especially considering every time you receive one of these emails, your inbox gets that much more full. The obvious questions would be “How did I get that many emails? How come I didn’t already clean up some of this junk?” Funny, I didn’t think reminders to do FAFSA, registering for housing, or the taboo of the “lost item” email weren’t important. While we as students do receive a lot of on-campus emails, these emails have a definite purpose and should not be taken lightly. There is, however, a difference between being observant or neglectful of e-mails and a pack rat.

The pack rat syndrome seems self explanatory; a pack rat is one that overly collects, sometimes without a specific reason. The blank case for emails is, while the email may not be important yet, it could be relevant later on, and hence it need not be deleted yet. Hey, you may find those keys sitting conveniently on a bathroom countertop or anywhere else you alertly are looking for free stuff. Yes, that can be helpful, but that email will no longer be relevant within two days. In fact, unless the email is preemptive about an upcoming event, it is time sensitive to maybe a week, if that. In addition to that, multiple reminders are a major contributor to e-mail build up as they assume that the previous messages had been deleted and need to be sent again to constantly remind the student body that fun things are abound on campus. On-campus emails aren’t the only culprit in filling the limit; many of us are also on Facebook and Myspace and any other number of social sites or have various consumer e-mails sent on a weekly basis, some even hourly.

Fighting this torrent is more a little by little cleaning process that I think can be done , even in extreme cases, within about a half hour at first and a minute a day for the rest of your school and work career. The first step in having a cleaner inbox is literally reaching a state of bare minimum e-mails. Read each e-mail as far back as they go, noting that simply deleting them won’t solve anything yet. In deleting e-mails haphazardly, vital information can be lost and never recovered or recovered at expense of time. This neglectful treatment of information always leads to downfall in the long run though and is a habit that needs to be stopped. Reading each e-mail ensures that there was an actual reason to save its contents and helps develop the next skill to keep your inbox healthy.

With a bare bones inbox, now the next step can be taken. Every day, at least once a day, take a seat and just file through the inbox, looking at the day’s mail and any mail that is over a week old. It’s tedious, it can be sometimes reach the point of being a hassle on some days, but with an organized inbox, tackling school gets a little easier and goes beyond even that.

One major point to focus on when deciding what e-mails to keep and what to delete can also be a picky issue if it isn’t time sensitive but is important information to remember, such as e-mails from recruiters or other job hunt persona. Deleting an e-mail without retaining an address is cutting a vital link to finding a job connection.

As a closing thought, while I have the opinion that we are bombarded with e-mails in a ridiculous fashion, we, as the leeches we are to our various computers, deserve to be organized and professional in the treatment of our system and our communications. Being professional is the result of following a procedure and sticking to it every day. Reading, responding, and managing e-mails in your inbox will help you develop both as a student and as a professional later on.