Clear communication in emails is not only helpful in the workplace, it is essential.  Everyone at work gets tons of email and it can become unmanageable to sort and find something specific.  Searching through emails for dates and subjects can use a lot of valuable time during the workday.  To help organize myself, I use the subject line to provide a quick view of what the email is about.  If it is a short email, I will put the whole message in the subject line.

Not everyone will follow your lead

For those emails that are not clear in the subject line, you can either forward them to yourself with a clear subject line for sorting/storing purposes or you can open the email and rename it (depending upon your email program).  Creating a subject line that makes sense to you is especially helpful because you may not remember the name of the person who sent you the email.  You can also label or tag emails but that may not help in all situations.

We recently changed from using Lotus Notes to Google mail, a totally different look with more restrictions.  My workplace does not allow email being used for official file storage.  To combat this, I set aside time each week to archive.  This time allows me the opportunity to get any information I need from my emails out of the email client and into another electronic format.  I found that copying the email into a Word document and saving in an aptly named folder works for me.

Have you run into challenges with your sorting and finding an important email?  How did you solve this issue?