Taming E mail Sent Folder Strategies

All right, what I'd like to do here is sort of give you a different way to think about your Sent Items folder at this point. You know, a lot of people see it just sort of as the repository of what they sent, but I would actually like to make you think about whether maybe you could use your Sent Items folder as a way to actually see what would have been your inbox if you filed nothing. So let's talk about this because that gives you the potentially the capability to put even more of your stuff in your inbox away in the first place. And here's why I see it as a backup of what your inbox would be if you filed nothing. Think about your Sent folder and think about your inbox. If you get a message in your inbox that has some real value or merit, it really is an email of substance from one of your key customers, one of your key clients, one of your key coworkers, one of your key vendors, what do you think the likelihood is that you're either going to reply to that message or forward it on to somebody else? Now when I ask this in my live programs, I usually get 60%, 80%, sometimes 90% reply on that. People just say it's a very high percentage, and what that means is that what your Sent Folder becomes— it has a few original compositions that you composed without having a correlating email in your Inbox, but the vast majority of what's in there are messages that you replied to or forwarded from a message you received, which means it's effectively a surrogate or a copy of what your Inbox would be if you filed nothing. And if you think of it that way, doesn't that give you even more confidence putting all of the emails in your inbox away once you've either got them done or got them under your calendar or your task list? I mean, if you think about it, you've already got a copy of what your inbox would be, so you don't need to keep all that stuff in your inbox. You can put them away once you're done with them. Out of sight, out of mind. So that's sort of the way I want you to think about this. And what's interesting is, depending on which software you're using, email or Outlook or Gmail, you've got some options here. In Outlook, it actually gives you some really cool capabilities to do some sorting so it can help you find stuff even better. Let me show you what I mean. Let's pop into my Microsoft Outlook and I'm going to go into my Sent folder and you'll notice I have this truncated down. I've collapsed these a little bit to protect client and customer privacy here. I've done that in a way to allow to keep that from being shared too publicly and Notice you can do this very simply. All I have to do is come in and you see these little lines here in your Outlook? You can grab those, pick those up and collapse those or make them wider to show more or less as you need. Now coming back into Sent, let me just show you something here. I'm going to come down and I am going to take this email here from Carol who's one of my business partners and I am going to sort by that and look, it brings all of my Carol messages together. Or what I can do is take an email that starts out with Any and hit Subject, and now I get all the ones that say Any, and I can get those sorted together. And notice this, I can even take emails that have attachments, and I can pick one that has a little bit of a larger attachment, sort by size, and very quickly and easily find all the emails that have larger size attachments. By the way, notice this. Think about this. I want you to think carefully about this. I just sorted by size. What if you spent 5 minutes a week opening up all these emails that have the really large attachments in your Sent folder and remove those attachments? Because think about it, if an email is in your Sent folder and it has an attachment on it, where did the attachment come from? That's right, it came from you, which means You don't need it because you've already got it someplace else. If you just started sorting your Sent folder 5 minutes every Thursday morning and deleted attachments off of the emails, you don't have to get rid of the emails, just delete the attachments off the emails, you could get rid of a massive amount of size in your mailbox. But the beauty of this is that it gives you the opportunity to sort these things by person, by subject, by size. —and that gives you some options for finding stuff. Because, you know, once again, I could go in here and take a look and find any email here from Randy, and now I can take these ones from Randy and watch this, using the Shift key, I can make all of these a group. Or I could use the Ctrl key to take that one out, and that one out, and that one out, and add this one down here. See that? Now I've got a group, and now that I've got those as a group, coming back down here a little bit, down to where that group— oh well, the group disappeared. So let me do this again. Let's take this one, let's hold the Shift key, let's come down here, and let's use the Ctrl key again to take that one out, and to take that one out. And now I can take these as a group and move them all into one of my folders. See what I'm doing there? I can create groups as needed using either the Shift key or the Control keys, and by doing that capability, I can make groups very quickly to either find messages I want by using the sorting capabilities as well as create these groups. Now in Gmail, I can't really go into my, uh, Sent Items folder in Gmail because I have a lot of personal client stuff and I don't have the same capabilities, so I'm gonna go into my Drafts folder here real quick. Because it gives you the same idea here. In Gmail, what you do is you don't use the sorting capabilities. Instead, you use your search field. And check this out, so I can come up here and just type in the word request because if I put in request and then I do the search, it's going to bring up all the emails that are in here that are related to requests. Or I could get rid of that and just show my basic drafts items folder. OK, so use this as a way, and then I can select messages once I find the ones that I want and tag them into appropriate labels, as well as potentially archive them if I so desire. So the key point here is that either way you can quickly and easily select and create groups in your Sent Items folder to allow you to do what it is that you really like to do. So keep that in mind. Your Sent Items folder can be a surrogate. It's a place to find stuff. It's a place to manage your stuff. You can sort it by subject. You can sort it by sender. You can sort it by size. You can use that option of sorting by size as a way to reduce mailbox capabilities. You can use the Shift and Control key to create groups, which can really help with speeding up filing. And in Gmail, you can use your search function within your Sent folder to help you find stuff within there. And also make groups by using your checkboxes. And by using all of these capabilities, it gives you a lot more confidence in being able to keep what you've got not in your inbox proper. Because if you keep it in your inbox, you're going to read it again, even if you're already done with it. Now, one final point that I want to share with you here is this: sometimes people go, "Well, Randy, if What about an email that's really important? What if I send a really important email? Are you saying should I just keep it in my Sent folder? And effectively I'm saying yes, your Sent folder is where you want to keep a copy of that. But if it's a truly important email, one that I really want to make sure that I've got the reference of what I sent to that client or customer, often what I will do is when I send that reply or that forward or that original message to a client or customer and I want to make sure I've got a record of it in that client or customer or project folder, when I'm getting ready to hit send out to the individual party it's going to, I will blind carbon copy myself on that message. Because if I blind carbon copy myself, once I hit send, a copy of it will be in the Sent folder, but then I'll get a second copy of that same message back in my own inbox, which I can then file into my client or my customer or my project folder as a record of that email transaction. So a few tips here for you on how you can use the Sent folder to give yourself more confidence putting stuff away more ease in finding stuff, as well as even finding that email that— you ever have an email that you deleted that you really wish you would have kept? Well, maybe you do still have it. Did you reply to it or forward it? Never forget your Sent folder might be an option for finding that too. Now that we talked about this, let's go to our next chapter where what we're going to discuss is the process for cleaning up that messy inbox. Alright, come back to that in just a moment.