iHCPL the next generation Spring Cleaning #29: Email

I set up a Gmail account before I moved to Houston. It’s useful not only for personal mail, but also for listservs, that way they don’t overwhelm my work mail, and I can read them without distraction at home. The only downside of this is that I now have two e-mail inboxes to keep up with. Which leads right on to the next topic: keeping them up-to-date.

Oooo, I did it I went through every single e-mail I had in my work account following the mantra:

• Do
• Delete
• Defer
• Delegate

I did all the ones that I could do in two minutes or less. I deleted all the ones that were out-of-date or unnecessary. I deferred by converting anything that I thought might be useful in the future to a text file and saved it to the Z drive, and occasionally I sent it on to someone else and asked them to deal with it.

I arranged by date all the e-mails that I had in my Furniture Fixtures & Equipment file in Outlook and deleted everything that was older than three months, because any quotes that I was saving in there would have expired by now. I arranged by date everything in my sent file and deleted everything over six months old. I did the same with my deleted file but deleted everything over three months old.

For the next ten minutes my screen looked like this:

I updated my Contacts in Outlook. There were a number of @nhmccd.edu addresses that had to be changed to @lonestar.edu and a few people who had retired or otherwise left the employ of the library to be deleted.