Are You An Email Filer or Piler?

For me, managing email is one of life's little chores that I never seem able to really keep up with. Outlook is my email program, but what I use as an indispensable tool to really manage it all ... ... is the excellent Jason Clarke may have the answer. You see, I'm a Piler not a Filer: Filers tend to have a very large hierarchy of folders that they have built over time, and carefully move each email to it's rightful place once it has served it's purpose. For filers, nothing feels better than to completely empty their inbox; it means everything has been tidied up. Pilers, on the other hand, tend to leave everything in their inbox. They feel that they can quickly search their inbox for anything that they might need, so they can't be bothered to take the time to build a complicated and confusing hierarchy of folders to have to go looking through when they need to find an old message. Pilers consider their inbox as a storage area for tasks that are on the go, reminders, pretty much anything they might want to store in digital format. In reality, I'm a wannabe Filer. NEO Pro does all the folder hierarchy for me. I do make an effort once a quarter, sorting stuff, archiving it, etc. Yet I still have a massive inbox in Outlook. Then Jason hits home: I consider Pilers to be rude. You respond to your voicemail in a timely fashion, don't you? If you can't be bothered to adhere to a system that ensures you respond to the email you receive, you're being rude If you're a Piler, it really does need a commentary like this to make you stop and think about how you seem to others who send you email and don't hear back from you, either in a timely fashion or at all. Even with a great productivity aid like NEO Pro, I am so guilty! Heck, I've even got other tools like NevilleHobson.com blog which focuses on business communication and technology.