For scheduling, pull a task from master list, choose appropriate time to take action, and schedule it into your calendar. If it is a project or a long-term or complex task, break it into manageable pieces and then schedule each of pieces into your calendar. By breaking your projects and large tasks into small chunks, you will be able to better estimate how long it will take you to finish, and you won't feel overwhelmed by size of task.

Planning and scheduling are both valuable habits to develop, as they keep you on track and focused on both your short term and long term goals. At end of year you?ll be amazed at how many things you were able to accomplish simply by taking them out of your head and putting them into your calendar.

Monica Ricci has been an organizing specialist since 1999, and her motivational presentations teach effective organizing and simplifying techniques for home and work. She also offers free email tips and ideas on how to make life simpler and more organized. Her topics include clutter control, paper management, time management, organizing space and procrastination.Contact Monica at 770-569-2642 or Monica@CatalystOrganizing.com.

Your e-mail program may also have filters that you can set up to redirect e-mails with certain key words in subject line or text body. For example, if you get a lot of junk e-mail regarding contests, you could choose to flag any incoming e-mail with word ?win? in its subject line. Once software sees key word, it automatically directs that e-mail into trash and you never even see it in your inbox.

A technique you can use to reduce download wait time on your e-mails is to set your preferences within your e-mail client to only download messages that are a certain size or smaller. I use a maximum setting of 15K (15,000 bytes), which means I don?t automatically get any attachments unless I choose to retrieve them from server. Setting your preferences this way will allow you to see first few lines of a message, but will leave bulk of it on server for you to retrieve, but only if you elect to. This little trick also keeps many viruses from landing on your computer because you never download attachments to your machine.

Once you?ve chosen which e-mails to save, create various folders within e-mail program to sort and track messages. If you have only one inbox and it?s holding every e-mail from past six months, you?re in ?communication chaos? and things are slipping through cracks. When setting up sorting folders, choose carefully what you name folders, so that you remember what each one means. You can create folders with project names, client names, sender?s names, or action needed to be taken.

For example, create a folder called ?to be answered? for those e-mails that require a definitive reply from you. There are many categories by which to sort your e-mails, and only you know which categories and labels will be most relevant and effective for you in your business.

If you try steps outlined here, you can take control of your e-mail overwhelm. Once you set up a framework for organizing your e-mails, you?ll be amazed at how quickly you can find what you need and more importantly, take overwhelm factor out of your electronic communication.

Monica Ricci has been an organizing specialist since 1999, and her motivational presentations teach effective organizing and simplifying techniques for home and work. She also offers free email tips and ideas on how to make life simpler and more organized. Her topics include clutter control, paper management, time management, organizing space and procrastination.Contact Monica at 770-569-2642 or Monica@CatalystOrganizing.com.