The Hot Iron

Thursday, January 04, 2007

People are, after all, people

Since I started my business, Dunkirk Systems, over two years ago, I have saved just about every email message I send or receive.  This is now a good thing, due to the recent Supreme Court ruling on email, but I digress.  In order to manage the volume of messages, a detailed hierarchy of folders and subfolders has evolved in my email client, and for the most part has worked well, allowing me to easily browse or search messages.

There is one folder in particular that has been burgeoning, the one named “networking.” In this folder I place emails exchanged with people I have met at networking events or frequently communicate with, but who are not a client, potential client, vendor, etc.  I had a couple of subfolders in there, but for the most part it was one big bucket of messages to people.

Yesterday, I renamed the “networking” folder to “people” and setup a few initial subfolders for specific individuals as well as events and conferences.  I thought to do this shortly after I wrote my last post about how a job candidate is a person, as I was dragging emails into the big bucket.

Over time, I will go through the thousands of emails and classify them further.  Why?  It will be a good refresher to some of the people that I have met as I have started and evolved my business, and remind me of people that I may want to reconnect with.  Going forward, I hope it will help me in keeping connected with people.