13 December 2006 - 1:51Interacting with a large number of people

Large organizations come with large number of people. As you work in such an organization you will interact with many people and it is important that you interact with them efficiently.
Email is the form of communication that you will use the most for interacting with other people. One good thing about email is the fact that it remains on record, once you have received an email you can archive it for further reference. It is important that the archiving process is efficient, you should be able to retrieve a particular message fast if you need to.
Once you start in a project you should determine how to split the messages you receive from your co-workers and put them in multiple bins with meaningful names. You should be able to drop the same message in multiple bins, each bin is essentially an index which should be populated with this message if it fits the purpose. Outlook is a product which is far superior to Lotus Notes from this point of view (at least as far as I see it).
The number of bins should be kept under control, you don’t want to mushroom them. The bin should be regarded as an index which allows you to retrieve information fast, rather than a collection of loosely-related items.