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This post is aimed at small business practitioners who are looking to become more effective in their daily practice. For today, we’ll talk about basic email applications, and how to handle your Inbox. The next post in our Optimize Your Small Business Series will be about how to build a quality list and the third on tips for using email more effectively.

If you’ve been in business for awhile, you’re muddling through with something already. Here’s a way to make a new start and work smarter in future.

Best Day-to-Day Email Applications

Despite all the reported threats over the years, I used Microsoft Outlook for a good long while, because it came with Office 2007 and I’d paid for it. I liked that it had a calendar and task list I could keep open all the time. I liked that my data resided on my own system and not the Internet. But, under Microsoft’s new pricing scheme, I can’t affordably update Office 2007. So, over the last few months, I’ve been experimenting. The solution I landed on is Mozilla Thunderbird, by the great developers who brought us Firefox. Two new add-ons sealed the deal for me: Lightning, is Mozilla’s new calendar add-on for Thunderbird, and appears to have all or most of the same capability as Outlook. ThunderBrowse, the second add-on, allows you to view links within an e-mail without opening another browser.

Most everyone else in the world is using Google’s Gmail, and for good reason — it gets the job done, with power and options to spare. A lot of colleagues and bloggers I look up to recommend Gmail, and it’s consistently well reviewed on any number of business and technology websites. Gmail, when paired with Google Docs, is particularly well-suited for calendar and document sharing and will surely be a good bet for many of you. For people, like me, who want the capability of downloading to their own computer or laptop. Gmail offers an offline option. It also comes with some new bells and whistles, such as Forgotten Attachment Detector and Wrong Recipient Detector. Oh man, those two features alone are almost reason enough to change!

An Inbox That Works

Anyone with a strong desire to find a new way of organizing all aspects of their business, to include e-mail, would do well to check out any of the following three branded systems, which are pretty much the gold standard these days in terms of business organization. All three have an online web presence, videos, and a book out or on the way.

• Getting Things Done, by David Allen;
• Inbox Zero by Merlin Mann, of 43 Folders; or
• Keeping Your Inbox Empty, by Stever Robbins, the Get It Done Guy.

What works for me is an amalgam of those, and it only works as well as I use it. I try to empty my Inbox every day by sorting it into the following folders:

• Action — items I still have to follow-up on in some way.
• Projects — a big folder with a few, very few, folders within it — for major projects I’m working on, plus one for family, one for an organization I’m active in.
• RSS/Newsletters — which are set up to automatically feed into this folder.
• Junk — most caught by Thunderbird; I check periodically to make sure someone didn’t get sent there by mistake.

Putting the Two Together

• I TRY to look at emails only twice a day, mid-morning and late afternoon. Sometimes I get pulled back in more often, but I’m working on it — and any progress at all is a victory here.
• I TRY to handle every piece of email only once. I read it and, if relates to an event or meeting, I enter it in my calendar. Right then. If possible, I toss the message after that. Or, for reference, may move it to one of the project folders, under Archives.
• I review items in the Action folder at the end of every workday, and again Sunday night.
• I look at RSS feeds & newsletters once or twice a week; usually while I’m watching TV.
• I don’t use project management software except for very large client projects. My program of choice is Basecamp. Thunderbird’s Lightning comes with a simple task manager that, in combination with the action folder, keeps me relatively straight between big projects.

NOW, let me hear from you! What’s working well for you in your work place and what cool stuff have you found the rest of us need to know about? Conversely, what is driving you crazy?

Next time: we tackle the challenge of building a database and some basic email tips and tricks.

Meanwhile, check out the other posts in this Optimize Your Small Business series:

• Part 1, a Backup System That Works
• Part 2, Best Basic Apps