Organizing Your eLife

Organizing Your eLife I struggle every day (and have for a long time) with how to file emails. I am afraid to delete messages that I might need in the future. When I get really ambitious or fed up with my lack of organizational skills, I create seemingly meaningful folders in my inbox. Sure, that works fine the first day, but the next day, the categories Ive created either make no sense or I cant remember where I put an email. Now lets carry this over to organizing contacts in my email, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Jeez, this gets tricky. Ive been to workshops on how to organize your life. Usually, they say, find a system that works for you. Well, if I could figure out a system, maybe it would work. What I do know is that by organizing and categorizing my eLife, I would spend less time searching and more time doing. I would be able to send stuff to the right people in less time and be able to locate information when I need it. It makes sense to me in Job Search that these would be the email folders (and other categories) one might want to use. Friends Family Networking group (use its name if it has one) Volunteer (again, use the organizations name) Industry contact Occupation contact Referrals Job alerts Company Name of Job submitted (so there will be many of these folders) Company Insider Facebook allows you to create LISTS.   This can be important if you only want some of your network to see some of what you are up to.   You can set security settings according to Lists. Twitter, as it appears from their site is too cumbersome for my liking.   Ive been using Tweetdeck since I started using Twitter and have become familiar with it (but now I use Hootsuite).   There are others that do pretty much the same thing.   These tools allow you to separate the Twitter stream by category (hmmm, maybe we can use the same categories from above in Twitter too!). My Feedly set up is a bit different.   I categorize the sites I read by topic more than category, though there is some overlap! Does anyone have a system they use that they would like to share?   I think there are many others out there who struggle like me!   We need help!