Do not use Emails to manage tasks

Don't use emails to manage your tasks. Emails are just one form of communication, just like phone calls and SMS messages. Browse through and read them, and then assign them to a real task list. I know it's tempting because we are all addicted to emails, and a lot people move emails to folders like ToDo and Completed. They even break it down futher into Urgent, Later or some other mechanism.

Several emails may be just dealing with a single task. Therefore replying to 80% of them, can give you false sense of accomplishment. Your job usually is not to respond to emails, but to complete tasks. A quick phone call for example, may complete the task, whereas responding to several of those emails hasn't actually resolved it. Most of the time, you are tracked by tasks you have to do, not by number of emails replied. Some may fire dozens of emails on their Blackberry, but responding to all of them is not actually what they want you to do, finishing tasks is.

A single email can have 3-4 important tasks, while the other 8 in your inbox are low priority tasks. 8 emails in your ToDo folder aren't really helping you prioritise or an accurate representation of your real task list. So browse through them and then assign them to tasks, which you can prioritise.

Unless your email program has the option to attach notes to email it, you can' track items related to it like phone calls, orders, face to face discussions and report you had to write. Those are all related to finish the tasks at hand, if you are only tracking the email as your task, you are not capturing the other things you have to do to respond to it (or finish the task). This will also help you explain to people not familiar with what you're doing, what exactly is involved in the tasks that you need to do.

"See to do this task (assigned via email), I had to call Vendor A six times, get three quotes to purchase replacement part and then drive to the datecenter to fix it."

Filing emails

I used to this a lot, filing emails in project folders and what not. This doesn't really work well. What works better are gmail style labels as sometimes one email may belong to different projects.

It's actually better to just move emails that are not mailing lists to one large Archives folder. Mailing lists will have their own archives.

Finding the emails will be actually easier, as you can refer to your task list or event notes which will have email correspondence as either a note or task, which would have a date and also name. This will be a very quick search on a single folder, compared to digging through multiple folders and then resorting to entire account searches and so on as you try to remember who and when you sent an email related to task a month ago.