Ever tried to organise a really, REALLY, REALLY messy room?

Picture a messy, disorganised, cluttered, upside-down room. No, not that one, messier! Almost there! Messier still! Got it?

Okay, now imagine you have to organise it. But, you cannot throw anything out, and there just is not enough space to hold everything even if you could arrange it.

An almost impossible task if you really give it some thought.

Office paperwork is just like that. Computer file systems. Network storage. E-mail inboxes too.

You might not be able to do anything about all the office paper cluttering up your life, and the computer file system might just be a battle best not fought, but you do not have to win every battle to win the war with clutter.

If you are anything like me, some days you spend almost your entire existence with your e-mail client open, sending messages back and forth across the world with clients, employees and contractors, and hopefully keeping track of it all with dozens of flagged messages awaiting a follow-up or further action to be taken.

The other issue we all face is the "pack rat" mentality when it comes to digital data. Storage is cheap so why not save everything? The only problem is that software applications and their search features are not keeping up with the glut of information we are collecting.

The major problem with most e-mail systems is that they are not actually engineered to allow the end-user, that would be you, to get things done, and get them done efficiently.

Face it, Microsoft Outlook and gmail are very fine applications, but they are stuck in the 1970’s idea of e-mail workflow methods. Microsoft even has an add-on package that you can purchase that provides enhanced CRM (customer relationship management) features to ensure that follow-ups and contact information does not fall through the cracks. Most modern era e-mail packages used in the 21^st century cater to a lowest common denominator in terms of functionality and provision for communication.

For this article, I am concentrating mostly on the features of Microsoft Outlook as I have found that is the package most people, who run Microsoft Windows and take their e-mail seriously, actually use. Apple Mac OS X is a whole other subject and I will have to talk about that at another time to give it the time and treatment it deserves.

There are a couple of really simple steps you can employ to getting on top of the e-mail clutter and staying there. Many of the steps are applicable to other e-mail clients too, but some of the plug-ins worth investigating are only available for Microsoft Outlook.

The first step, and the most obvious one, is to create folders for important e-mails such as business correspondence (one for each client), friends (one for each person or category) and family. Microsoft Outlook makes this easy, and using the search function will let you track down all of the e-mails to or from a particular person and move them into the proper folders.

Once you have the folders set up, you can automatically direct all future e-mails to the proper folders by setting up filters in Microsoft Outlook. Unfortunately, whilst the filtering system is reasonably powerful, it is hellishly cumbersome to work with if you have many custom rules and if I really recommend purchasing an add-on package that will make the sorting and storing of e-mails much easier.

There are several add-on products available for Microsoft Outlook that can automatically shuffle your e-mail to the appropriate folders, or even delete it completely before you ever get to see it. The latter functionality being very useful for those annoying aunts that send you the funny cat pictures.

My personal favourite at this time is SimplyFile from TECH HIT. SimplyFile works with all current versions of Microsoft Outlook, and has been very stable in day-to-day usage. After a brief automated training period, SimplyFile acts like a switchboard operator, routing e-mails to the appropriate folders without any nudging from you.

Beyond the automated filtering system in SimplyFile, there are also two very useful features that make working with Outlook so much easier. The first is the “create task from e-mail” option, allowing you to create an Outlook task from the e-mail you are reading, and the other is “create appointment from e-mail” which sets up a dated event at some point in the future. Both of these features are worth the price alone if you have a lot of e-mails that

The company that makes SimplyFile, TECH HIT also make two other great products, called EZDetach and MessageSave which are both worth checking out and help with the clutter in your e-mail.

The greatest waste of time you can force upon yourself when it comes to organising e-mail is to not organise it at all. The search features in gmail, Microsoft Outlook and Apple Mac Mail are exceptionally capable, when they work, but over-reliance on indexing and search when everything is just dumped into a big pile will eventually bite you in arse once the number of e-mails you have to wrangle goes beyond a few hundred messages.

If you have to keep correspondence from clients, business partners, sales leads, employees and colleagues, you need to create a systematic process that can be applied the moment you handle a message. Just like in the ideal world of handling a piece of paperwork only once, if you want to be as efficient as possible, you must apply the same principle to e-mail correspondence too.

Got other non-obvious tips for efficient handling of e-mail? Drop me a line or leave a comment and I’ll be sure to create a follow-up article.

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So that I do not bore everyone with mindless statistics on a too regular basis, here is the bi-monthly round up of my traffic since this website started in the middle of February. This article covers website traffic for May and June.

I intended to post information at the end of May, but as I did not change my strategy in May from what I was doing in March and April, i.e. write content, talk one-on-one about this website with people, and share the occasional link through a social bookmarking website, I did not feel that any great insight would be gleaned from just a few updated numbers.

I now have traffic data for four complete months, ignoring the two weeks in February when the website was live but had very little audience. With four months of data I have the ability to sketch out a real graph and begin to draw some inferences from it.

I wrote back at the end of April that each month’s traffic had grown by 300%, well it is very easy to grow by 300%, month on month, when you only have a few dozen visitors to your page per sample period. Now that the website is becoming a little more established, I expect the growth rate to actually slow down if the growth rules of this website work like every other commercial website my company has ever created for clients.

There has been a steady month on month increase in traffic, both due to some small marketing efforts through social media such as Twitter, Facebook and the major social bookmarking websites.

There has also been the steady flow of traffic from search engines, many of the search terms are the standard affair.

In the web server logs there are the usual personal development searches, along with an increase of searches for "treadmill desks," "sensecam" and "World of Warcraft."

The number of people searching specifically for “Microsoft word draft mode” or "Microsoft word get rid of green and red squiggles" surprises me too. Perhaps Microsoft need to make that a knowledgebase topic because there appear to be a lot of people looking for the solution.

Looking at the traffic statistics of both StatPress and Webalizer, the growth is around 30% for the past two months. By the 21st or 22nd of each month I have surpassed the previous month’s visitors and page views.

I have had a few anomalous spikes in my traffic, which after analysis I was able to account for and remove from the traffic log. Sometime around the 15th of June a number of Made-for-AdSense (MFA) websites started using a modified WordPress plug-in called "Related Websites" which can perform a keyword search of your blog articles and link to related WordPress blogs within the network.

I had heard “good things” about Related Websites and thought I would give the plug-in a shot, using it to show related pages within my own blog that were pertinent to the article being read. Prior to switching to Related Websites, I was using Yet-Another-Related-Posts-Plug-in (YARPP) and wanted to experiment with different options whilst my traffic numbers are still reasonably low. Low traffic, lots of experimentation, not too much disruption to my readers.

I had started to see pollution of inbound and outbound spam links for close to two months, and they were just a minor annoyance at first, but as the month of June proceeded I began receiving more and more spam links, both coming to and linking out from this blog.

Unfortunately there is always a few complete assholes in any group who completely screw it up for everybody else. The owners and operators of MFA blogs, which are on the rise within the Related Websites network, are those assholes this time.

Unfortunately, just disabling the "related websites" part of the Related Websites plug-in, and making use of the "related pages" to show relevant pages within my own blog, keeps the website within the Related Websites network and hence, sending and receiving traffic from the spam blogs.

I would not mind the inbound traffic so much, but if your posts contain images, the Related Websites plug-in displays that image on the spam blog. This hit counts in your tracking statistics, consumes your bandwidth (no different to image leeching), pollutes your referrer log, and a bunch of other administrative nonsense I do not have the personal bandwidth for, taking time away from more important things.

I would like for legitimate blogs to get the image attached to the article in the excerpt being displayed, so I cannot really turn on the leech protect functionality in the web server control panel, but prevent the spam and MFA blogs from receiving the images. Right now, I don’t see any viable way of achieving this.

Once I cleaned out my statistics-tracking database and blocked the spam blogs using the web server software, the traffic began to settle down again to normal levels. Yes, it was great seeing all those “unique visitors” coming to my blog, but they were not. The hits were just false web traffic skewing my results. So out goes the Related Websites plug-in and I return to YARPP (for now).

When I wrote out the traffic statistics for the month of April, I made a mistake due to a bug in StatsPressCN that misreports data at the end of the day due to some issues with time zones. I fixed the numbers in that blog entry shortly after posting it but it is also a “feature” I need to be aware of in the future.

A friend asked me, shortly after I posted my website traffic update at the end of April, whether this website is going to be monetized heavily? And also, do I feel the usage of Google AdSense is somehow devaluing what I have to say?

The reality and intention is that I do intend to make money from this website, but mostly in indirect ways; selling services for my company, for my coaching and consulting, for products my company creates, and so on. So yes, there will be monetization in that regard. But, I also do not feel that Google AdSense, or any other advertising programme, that I run on this website will devalue it. It comes down to carefully monitoring what advertisements appear on this website.

Out of all of the websites I have been involved with creating and promoting, and there have been many, I have not run and marketed a purely personal website that is advertising supported before, so for me this is a good learning experience. I cannot very well attempt to educate clients with regard to how they can create revenue through advertising, sponsorship or affiliate sales, if I myself have not done it too.

I have never liked to bullshit clients on what they should or should not do, based purely on something I have read about or watched others do. If I have no direct experience with the subject matter myself, I have no business telling you your business. I laugh loudly, maniacally and most definitely disparagingly at much of the "self-help/self-improvement" industry, marketing and PR firms, and internet "gurus" telling you how to make money.

Much of what gets published by “people in the know” is regurgitated garbage they have read about, but never actually done. There are very few authentic people out there doing this stuff for real, and you can generally count the best on one hand.

You cannot be a criminal mastermind, or any kind of mastermind, if you take the well intentioned advice of people who have not been there and done that themselves. I am constantly asking of would-be advisors and well-intentioned people "from what authority do you speak?"

Face it, would you take advice on how to run a marathon from a 300lb couch potato who had never moved very far from their games console in their entire life?

Here are my traffic statistics for the period March 1^st to July 1^st.

Even though the month column shows the date as the beginning of the month, the statistics for each month are actually from the end of the month. I have yet to figure out how to make Google Docs spreadsheet just show the month and year in the formatting.

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