Dealing with disciplinary records
Emails have become a part of our lives both at work and at home. They’re easier to refer back to than paper letters and can be checked on nearly any device, from wherever you are. Those with office jobs often receive hundreds of emails every day and sometimes, it’s just not possible to find that specific email you’re looking for.
A cluttered inbox, filled with old and spam messages, can be frustrating and distracting in equal measure. It makes it hard to find the messages you’re looking for, stops you seeing new messages come through and generally makes you feel disorganised.
So here are a few email records management best practices you can use to manage your inbox better and keep messages to a minimum.
Categorise messages
The first step for better email records management is to file messages into folders, groups and priorities. Creating parent categories like projects and finances helps you organise company emails. Furthermore, folders for individual clients keep client work organised.
Most email programmes let you mark messages with labels and flags in order to sort by importance. It’s worth learning how to use them to organise your emails both on desktop and mobile.
Create rules and filters
Filters automatically sort your emails when they enter your inbox. You just need to tell your email provider what term to look out for and what action needs to happen. You can get quite detailed with them – presently Gmail has around 20 filters including subject titles, body text and email address. Depending on the filters you set up, your emails will automatically sort into different folders or archived.
Delete what you don’t need
It can feel rather daunting to delete a bunch of emails, but if you’re simply not going to read them, they’re just going to take up space and make it hard to find the emails that you actually need. Get deleting the emails you won’t read or classify them as junk mail and make your inbox a lot tidier as a result.
Be concise with your subject lines
When you’re sending an email that you might want to find later, try and use specific words in the subject line, rather than the usual ‘important’, ‘article’ or ‘review’. This becomes even more important if you tend to have long email chains with lots of people responding at different times. Be concise and descriptive and try and use words that are really specific to the email itself – it’ll make it much easier when you’re searching for them later on.
Email is the lifeblood of the modern office environment. Yet, while all email systems create records, most email systems aren’t designed to capture and manage emails as records. Rather, organisations need to look at an appropriate electronic record-keeping system that captures, manages and provides access to records through time.
At Access Records Management, we’re able to help companies store, scan and shred their essential records. We help them create organised digital filing systems and can store their files for them.
To find out how we could help you with your personal and business records management, contact our team today.
Related Posts
