Organization, #1

I've finally gotten most of the backlog cleared off. While I still have a few major reports to complete and manuscripts to review in order to get them submitted, at least I don't feel inundated. In the past several weeks I've cleaned up my office a little, at least getting some of the older stuff filed. I've started a reorganization of my work email inbox following GTG principles and an article about it that was in Macworld (March 2007 issue, not available on line). Right now I'm working from the following concept for my work email, at least the email that is still stored on the IMAP server.

Inbox - mostly messages read and not filed; my goal is to keep this relatively small in number; working to quickly file/archive/delete email I will never need in the future

Act on/Flagged - messages I need to act on within a few days, some that I flagged where a rule puts them in this folder from the inbox; these should be no older than 1 week.

Read and Review - messages I have read but want to review before filing or deleting; some of these will be the literature searches from various journals or PubMed that contain papers I want to at least read the abstracts; I hope to keep these rotating so no more than a week or two old

Waiting For - messages that contain items I need to act on but I'm waiting for further information

Archives (on IMAP server)
-- subfolders for specific topics, already acted on and stored
-- project specific folders, for quick access (also using MS Entourage Project Center with many of these)

Archives (stored in local folders) - these are messages either with big attachments that by necessity I have to move off the IMAP server (limited quota), or when older messages get to an age where I don't really need to act on them anymore. By default all archived work emails are stored on my work desktop computer. To confusing to try to synch work and laptop computers for this.

Regarding archived mail, my agency was reminded today about the regulation that we must preserve all e-mail that constitute agency records. While I'm not sure that much if any of the email correspondence I have constitutes "agency records" I'll have to review this regulation. The reminder also talks about keeping paper copies, which would be a big burden.

Anyway, it's a start!