Email, and Coupons

This blog, Pursuing Heart, is about pursuing God above all, and also ... about pursuing all things related to the heart and home. And as God is the Maker of our hearts, and of home and family, it is all connected. And within our homes, there is always the need to organize things to help our days run as smoothly as possible, and also to allow us to have more time to focus on things of most importance.

This week I knew that it was time to take care of an overflowing Inbox on my MacBook. I usually keep on top of this, but somehow, got behind over the past weeks, and found my Inbox filled with a little over 600 email messages the beginning of this week. I had answered and taken care of the most urgent as they came in, but the others had collected.

I learned a few years ago to set up some folders "On My Mac", within "Mail" ... this has been a huge help. It needed some reworking this week, and some additional folders set up ... so this was my main organization challenge for the week.

No "before" photo available ... but here is the proof: when I finished the project this afternoon, my Inbox had no emails!

All 600+ email messages have been either deleted, or moved to one of the folders "On My Mac" ...

1 - ones that need to be answered

2 - messages to print out

3 - email that requires some type of action 

four dated folders where I save emails for a few months, emails that I may need to refer to ~

then a number of folders where I put important emails that need to be saved long-term ~

Hopefully, now that I am back on track, I will keep this up daily, reading and answering emails right as I receive them, or, moving them over to a folder for future action.

Another little project that I spent less than an hour on earlier in the week was to do a bit of organizing of coupons. I am not big into clipping coupons, but there are always some that I want to save and use. So far, they have all been placed together in a ziploc bag in my purse. Not the most efficient method.

I came across an idea at iHeartOrganizing blog this week, and decided to use her idea to create several envelopes to store coupons in. With the use of some scrapbooking paper to brighten up the envelopes, and also using clear packaging tape to cover the envelopes to make them more durable, I now have four envelopes that fit right into a pocket in my Planner notebook. (I don't have a laminator as was suggested, so I just made do with clear packaging tape.) Am thankful for this fun little idea for coupons, as well as the free download with the labels for the envelopes.

Next week there will be a need for organizing of something else ... never-ending. It helps to love organizing, and to have access to good ideas.

Linked to 52 Weeks of Organizing