How do you handle all your emails?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m curious to hear about other people’s systems.

Here is my system for my work emails:

  1. I have access to my email address and an email address for the entire law firm. I have a folder for all emails addressed to me, and other folders for all my clients. Emails addressed to me are automatically sorted in their separate folder using Outlook rules.

  2. When I look through my inbox, every email I have to respond to I move to the folder that receives emails addressed to me. The rest get sorted by client name.

  3. I respond to all the emails that I can respond to without doing any additional work.

  4. I make a list of all the remaining emails and prioritize.

At least this is the ideal scenario. What usually ends up happening is that I start working on step two and a crisis develops. The crisis takes up a few hours, emails pile up, I have something scheduled outside the office, and the day ends with half the emails getting no response. Then the next day I have to sort the emails asking for updates on previous emails, and also phone calls from people who want responses.

I also use Outlook signatures for frequent emails that I send out.

What does everyone else do?