Merlin Mann of 43 Folders recently brought up an excellent concern about over-organization of email folders. My experience has been that it is indeed easy to go overboard in setting up folders to file “useful” or “of interest” emails…especially when really excited about getting organized after a long bout of chaotic habits.

I haven’t read his MacWorld article that Gina Trapani refers to in her post about slimming down to an effective system using, what she calls, the Trusted Trio.

They both say that just about any archived email can be found with a good search program. Sounds good. Sounds simple.

So I went back to my email program to give my folder organization a stern looking over. Could I narrow down my folders to 3 or 5? Nope. Sure, I did see folders that could easily be deleted and that never should have been created in the first place (yikes!) But what else did I find?

I saw three main types of folders that I use frequently:

• what I call “Ready to send”. Mostly client related: forms, generic communication, invoices/receipts. These are all in one folder.
• 1:1 client communication. Most, not all, are time sensitive. I do refer to previous emails, but usually not more than two months old. A good search program might suffice, but this is easy for me as is.
• the rest (and there are quite a few) actually aren’t emails at all! This is how I track developing ideas and store project research. I’ve long thought there is a better system for tracking this information, I haven’t made it a priority to discover it yet.

Many thanks to Merlin and Gina for providing the compelling arguments that encouraged me to review my system!