When do
you delete an "important" electronic communication?
As a
prudent person, your immediate response will be why do you want to delete
something that is important? But a question does not answer a previous
question. It just initiates a questionnaire with no one willing to answer.
Back in
the days when making paper from trees was an accepted thing, you would get all
your communication the postal route and you could either keep it or file it and
it would stay till willingly shredded or destroyed by arson, termites, or Acts
of God. With rising costs and more campaigners to save trees, almost all your
required communication now takes the electronic route.
Electronic
communication is indeed faster and economical. But it also creates a lot of
discomfort by the fact that unless opened on a screen you can't really see it.
Pointing to a Hard Drive and claiming it holds a few thousand document is not
really helpful if the documents do not open on a screen. You can hold them but
you can't see them. Theft is also easy. They will fit on something no larger
than your thumb nail.
Anyway,
with e-communication being the fastest and cheapest way at reaching out to
people, you are facing a barrage of, at times, useless chatter coming to you.
Ordinarily a confirmation of change of address request is you receiving your
mail at the new address. Now you will receive confirmation of this change by
email, text and even a phone call. Do you keep these messages as important or
delete them. With no paper backups, you are at a loss to know what to do and
prefer to err on the side of caution by storing them. The super cautious may
take a print and defeat the very purpose of going paperless.
So what
all is coming to you electronically? Bank statements, brokerage statements,
bills, sales campaigns, transaction records and what not. How do you store
these things.
- Retain the emails in your mail box.
- Download the attachments that came with the
email and store them in a folder in your hard drive.
- Do a and b above.
- Back up emails and your hard drive with a desk
top external storage device.
- Back up on line.
- Do a, b, d, and e above.
- Do f above and take a print of all
communication, file them and create cross references.
Electronic
communication has created more record keeping issues than paper communication.
Also the fact that it has actually increased cost to the recipients than the
senders. There is more time spent in checking mails, storing attachments and
sifting through junk mail figuring what is important and what is not. Also
there is the danger of emails bouncing due to full mailboxes giving rise to the
risk of losing out on the truly important communication.
But as
time progresses, there is no going back. These are some of the perils of modern
day mail and unless one chooses to live in a cave, there is no escaping it.
Happy storing and happy purging friends.
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