Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
(OP)
I work at a consulting firm for midstream oil and gas as a project engineer.
Basically, I'm having trouble finding an effective way in keeping my Outlook emails organized. I'm a victim of a "CC" feature for emails, thus I feel like I'm receiving as many emails as my project manager. I took the first step in creating separate PST files within outlook for each of the projects I'm in and then sub-folders similar to what you'd see in a project file with the Dewey Decimal System (1.0 Admin, 2.0 Scoping, 3.0 Right-of-Way / Permitting, 4.0 Engineering, etc.).
For some reason, I'm still having trouble finding this when I need to search for something. I also keep just about all my project-related emails as well (which I thought would be a good thing, just in case I need to find small details. But I'm starting to see the horrors of this practice), while at the same time, me and my project team save email dialogues that relates to the project (scope changes, acknowledgements, client comments, clarifications, etc.). Any insight on what you see to improve my organization? What should I consider when deciding to delete project-related emails?
Basically, I'm having trouble finding an effective way in keeping my Outlook emails organized. I'm a victim of a "CC" feature for emails, thus I feel like I'm receiving as many emails as my project manager. I took the first step in creating separate PST files within outlook for each of the projects I'm in and then sub-folders similar to what you'd see in a project file with the Dewey Decimal System (1.0 Admin, 2.0 Scoping, 3.0 Right-of-Way / Permitting, 4.0 Engineering, etc.).
For some reason, I'm still having trouble finding this when I need to search for something. I also keep just about all my project-related emails as well (which I thought would be a good thing, just in case I need to find small details. But I'm starting to see the horrors of this practice), while at the same time, me and my project team save email dialogues that relates to the project (scope changes, acknowledgements, client comments, clarifications, etc.). Any insight on what you see to improve my organization? What should I consider when deciding to delete project-related emails?





RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
Then I started keeping everything in a local .PST file, and ... lost it all thanks to the 2Gb file limit bug in Outlook. Outlook provided a 'full file' warning well after it was too late to save anything. MS' special recovery tools recovered a huge file that was full of nothing.
Later, at another outfit, my friend Kevin devoted way too much of his time to copying stuff out of Outlook and organizing it by project, sort of like you have done, on the Engineering server. ... which, knowing that outfit, was likely not backed up.
I don't think like Kevin does, so I could never just 'figure out' where he might have put any given piece of information. I relied very heavily on Agent Ransack to search the server and find stuff for me.
At least if you delegate one person to maintain one copy of everything on one server, you delay the problem of everyone's hard drives filling with duplicated dreck, and if you delegate a second person to back up that server every day, you shouldn't lose too much information in a crash, whether it's Outlook's fault or not.
As for deleting project emails, I wouldn't delete even one unless I could find a duplicate somewhere nearby. People who deal with 'Big Data' have recently coined a buzzword for 'De-Duplication' as a means of conserving storage resources, but I think that specific effort may be misguided in some respects, because the cost of storage is dwarfed by the cost of acquiring the stored information in the first place, and dwarfed again by the cost of resynthesizing information that was erroneously deleted, or misplaced. It's sort of analogous to treating paper drawings as mere sheets of paper, completely ignoring the investment made in applying markings to the paper.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
Best to you,
Goober Dave
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RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
From about 2005 to 2011 I led the site civil/site electrical design for a multi-project multi-site prison expansion program led by an architectural firm. When I closed down my end of it, I discovered that I had more than 12,000 emails for the program. And that doesn't include an uncounted number of emails generated by the other projects I worked on during that time, nor the flood of intra-company emails.
My general practice is to set up separate .pst files for each project and move emails from my inbox and outbox as soon as I have dealt with them. In practice, though, "as soon as" is often not very soon.
For long-term archiving, the best method I have found so far is MsgSave (http://www.msgsave.com/). After I am done with a project, I use MsgSave to bulk archive individual emails, which includes prefixing the files names with date+time for sorting and finding purposes. When Outlook archives, the file date+time stamp is when the email is archived and emails with the same subject aren't easily distinguished.
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"Is it the only lesson of history that mankind is unteachable?"
--Winston S. Churchill
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
Yet another reason to not use Outlook, or anything else from its authors.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
- Steve
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
Archive to specific project folder when traffic for that project dies down.
Periodically sort by biggest file size and delete all emails with 10+mb attachments that you don't really need to keep (or if you do, save that file somewhere other than in email.)
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
"Art without engineering is dreaming; Engineering without art is calculating."
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RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
2. http://www.manager-tools.com/2005/09/got-email
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parkinson's_law
When email volume picks up, I enable a rule that segregates all CC'd email. That only gets reviewed by me once a day.
I don't bother sorting non-actionable email beyond major categories like "Jobs", "HR", "IT". Using broad categories like this allow me to use a few keyboard shortcuts to file email. Keyboard is faster than the mouse. Also, Outlook's search has not let me down.
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
Used to use Newforma, but IT infrastructure costs and other upkeep were much higher than we were looking for for just an e-mail management solution. Newforma has capability to track submittals, RFIs, delegate tasks, act as an FTP site, etc. but we weren't using it for that so we weren't getting enough value out of it.
Now we use Oasys Mail Manager which is a much lighter, sleeker program that *only* does e-mail management. And is thus a bit better at it, in my opinion. Search is a little faster, and built right into Outlook. No need for an additional server or two like Newforma needed.
I also keep local copies of e-mails I've sent and received, just in case. We're on Exchange Online instead of a hosted mail server now, so should never be an issue. All of our e-mail is stored in the cloud and thus should never be lost since it's backed up to multiple Microsoft data centers.
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
Is that in a contract, or are you making an assumption?
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
... which brings up a point.
A while after our Outlook backup disaster, I asked my IT guy for a backup copy of a single file.
He couldn't produce it.
He was religious about backing up every day, to a set of nine tapes that were years old.
He had never bought any more tapes after installing the tape drive.
The tapes and/or the drive had pretty much worn out, so he couldn't really retrieve my file,
or probably any other file.
He didn't see that as a problem. I did.
Mike Halloran
Pembroke Pines, FL, USA
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
Multiple data centers is in the contract. That's the whole point of cloud-based storage, everything's redundant so unless you have a crazy act of god (or company shuts down), nothing should be lost.
Now if I were to accidentally delete an e-mail and then not notice it for 15 days, then it'd be gone forever (not counting NSA methods of getting it back). But as far as data loss due to servers breaking down, power surges, etc., there should be none and our contract says as much.
The tape drive issue would be a primary reason why storing online might be more beneficial. Most tape has a stated lifespan of 30 years, but that's under totally ideal conditions (rarely back up, stored in dry place at ideal temperature). Even backing up just once a month can decrease the tape's life expectancy by ~50%. Back up once a week and you're down to just a few years.
RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
On the phone you can cover 10 times as much in a few minutes as you can with a single email, with the added bonus that phonecalls include "tone of voice", which makes up a great part of human communication and is missed in the written word.
I try to only use email to send information to a group of people (no response required), or to communicate with a single person who I can't reach by phone. In that case, keep it short and sweet, and on a single subject.
Received emails - set a single time per day to read them, to avoid being distracted. Take time to deal with each one and file it before you move onto the next. If its a "group conversation email", does it really need a response - probably not.
Filing: I only keep emails with useful information, organised by folders with the subject name. Opinions get binned, system related ccs (some 500+ per week) go straight to junk.
That's how I manage emails. I know of a manager who doesn't bother reading any, at all. His inbox became more than he could manage during a day, so now he works on the basis that if it's really important, they'll phone.
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RE: Email Management û An Overwhelming Amount of Emails.
I agree that you can cover a lot of information on the phone in a few minutes, but I find that having things in writing solves endless miscommunication issues. Not to mention it covers your bum when two people disagree on what they said in a conversation.
And that manager, while understandably trying to stay focused, should at least have an auto-reply to let people know that if they require a timely response that they should call. People who don't respond to written communication in a timely manner (even to say they'll be a while before getting back to you) are just plain rude. There is no excuse for ignoring communication when you are the primary intended recipient.