You send and receive far more information via your email account than you record in paper documents and files these days. Buried in your inbox’s 1,847 emails are ticket confirmations, account information, receipts for online purchases, itineraries...and that’s not touching on important personal exchanges with family and friends. With the addition of online banking and bill pay, plus to-do lists, address books and documents, how can we organize the ever-increasing amount of information on our computers? With the right programs, you’ll be able to sort and store information so it’s a few clicks away whenever or wherever you need it.
Treat Email Like a Filing System
Your email account should be your virtual file drawer, so take a few minutes to create specific folders that will store emails and keep them from building up in your inbox. Leave only the emails that require response or follow up in your inbox and drag others to their respective files. Travel? Check. Invitations? Check. Delete any emails that aren’t of importance to save time and space. It’s also a good idea to use a color coded symbol or even the "Mark As Unread" feature to label emails that still need your attention.
As an alternative, many users choose Google’s email system, Gmail, because it organizes emails into conversations. So a back and forth exchange between you and your sister will appear together as one entry. Gmail also allows you to tag incoming messages with a customized set of colored labels rather than sorting into folders. When you are ready to file the labeled email, choose "Archive" and the message will be stored out of sight, until you search for it or call up its labeled group.
Do More With Online Bank Accounts
Banking online saves time, paper and postage. But you’re no longer receiving paper statements or itemized spending records that you can file. Don’t stop looking at your records. Aside from services that banks may provide for you to itemize online statements, there are web-based, free applications like Mint that sync with your bank and credit card accounts and allow you to review all of your spending from one location. Do you find yourself shopping online often? Billeo will organize receipts, passwords and payments for all of your online shopping transactions. It’s also free.
Order To-Do Lists, Reminders and Contacts:
If you have tasks to remember and you’ve moved beyond tying a string to your finger, you’ll be thrilled with Remember The Milk. The application works with platforms like Google, your iPhone or iPod Touch, Blackberry and Gmail to remind you of tasks via email, text message or instant messenger. You can add reminders from the web, your phone or even Twitter so that nothing gets forgotten. Evernote allows you to highlight and store items or information that you see while browsing online or take a photo of a business card or reminder and send it to your account. View and search through these images and clips, your own file of miscellaneous things to remember, when you log in. Maintaining a list of contacts while switching between multiple email accounts and home and office work is also a headache, unless you use an online address book like Plaxo to keep everything in one place. Plaxo conveniently syncs to your phone and links to sites like Facebook and Twitter, so you can see what your friends and colleagues are posting online.
Make Documents Flexible
Are you wondering how to organize important documents so they’re shareable or available wherever you go? With a program like GoogleDocs, you can upload a word processing document, spreadsheet or presentation and allow other users to access and edit the document, or just keep it on the web for your own work purposes when you’re working from another computer. On an Apple computer, Air Sharing syncs any documents you drag into your desktop "Air Sharing" folder with an identical folder on your iPhone. And Dropbox syncs documents between two computers: work and home or yours and your spouse’s. It’s all in the name of easier, faster and more productive computing.
