Quit organizing your email into folders!

A recent study by IBM asked the question: what takes less time, using search to find a buried email or trying to find it in one of your email folders?

It turns out that searching is much faster. On average, it took participants 66.07s to search for an email compared to 72.87s to find an email in a folder - but these times don’t take into account the time spent sorting the email into a folder in the first place!

These days it's much faster to sort and search through a single email folder than trying to find an email you've filed away in an email folder structure.

I show clients how to set up a folder called 'Filing Cabinet' and rely on their computer's brain to search for what they want rather than use their own brain to find it in a complicated folder structure. We already use this principle every day - whenever we do a 'google' search. 

Whenever I ask my workshop or coaching participants "what is google?" they reply "it's a search engine". I disagree - it's a filing cabinet . . . and it comes with a powerful search engine to find whatever we need in that filing cabinet!

So think of a single email folder (called Filing Cabinet) as 'google for your email'.