Get Organized: Email

Warning: This is a long and {kind of} boring post...

If you’ve been around this little blog here for any amount of time, you might know that I have a life goal of getting organized. Sound vague? It is. I haven’t yet defined fully what that means to me, and I don’t know that I ever will. I recently realized, however, that I really just need to take baby steps. Getting organized isn’t an overnight thing. It takes work. And while I get seriously stressed when things aren’t organized, I’m not an organized person by nature.

I’m the type of person that likes to list things out and figure out the ideal way to do things before I actually do them. I found myself swooning over Erin Condren planners and trying to find the best software to get organized, but eventually I realized that I’m trying too hard. Things really don’t need to be so difficult, and I can easily get organized without a bunch of fancy tools. So I thought that I would share with all of you how exactly I’m keeping myself organized these days.

Along with my blog, I also have a budding company and everything else in my personal life that I need to keep track of. This means three different email addresses, three different to-do lists, and three different calendars. If it sounds overwhelming, it is. Looking back, I probably would have done things a little bit differently, but this is how it is now. In the future, hopefully I will consolidate a few things {so be prepared, eventually, for a potential blog name change...}.

Anyway, the most useful tool I’ve found is, not surprisingly, Google. I do use a few other programs and apps, but Google really  has everything you need to get organized. Promise.

I don’t want to overwhelm you with too much information in one post, however, so today I’m only going to talk about how to organize Google accounts and email addresses. I’ll cover additional topics in the future.

Google recently started allowing people to sign into multiple accounts at once, making it a lot easier to check multiple email accounts and calendars if you don’t access them from one account.

Instead of writing all of these tedious instructions in this post, I’ve actually put together a PDF for you to download here, if you’d like.

This works great for those who don’t want to forward emails to one account, but who want to access multiple accounts at once {for example, a personal account and a blog email address}.

I personally do not want to keep three tabs open at once in my browser, so I have chosen to forward my blog email address and my company email address to my personal email address. I’ve also configured the settings from my personal account so that I can send from any of these three email addresses without having to sign into the accounts at all.

Click here if you would like to see how to forward emails to one address and configure your account so that you can send emails from multiple addresses.

This was a long and lengthy post, so if you’re still here, bravo! Hopefully this will help a few people out there who wish to make managing their email easier. I wish someone would have told me all of these tricks, so that I wouldn’t have had to figure them out on my own, which is why I decided to write these posts.

Here are a few other topics that I think I might go over in future posts:
Scheduling and Calendars
Menu planning and grocery shopping
Using Google Documents
Managing to do lists with Google Tasks
Blogging tips and tricks
Organizing blog subscriptions through Google Reader

Let me know if you have questions about anything, and if you have a suggestion for something you want me to cover in a future organization post!

Sidenote and completely unrelated: Ever wonder what I do for my “day job”? Just click one of the links above. I write instructions for software. It’s just as exciting as it sounds.

Thanks for reading friends. And again, let me know if you have any questions!