Ever had trouble juggling with about a hundred emails, 5-6 meetings, and ending up with couple of missed deadlines; in a day's work? This is my experience every 2-3 days in a week. And I heard quite a few of my friends and co-workers whining about the same; not being able to manage such a busy day at work. Well, we all know out of those hundred odd mails a whole bunch would be just FYIs and another bunch would be just irrelevant for us. We see those mails and keep wondering, why would my name be there in that mailing list! And same holds true for the meetings; in half of those, people try to impose the “expert” opinions on others and argue over some matter thats remotely associated with the purpose of the meeting. And while attending all these meetings and getting lost in the unnecessary emails, at the end of 8 hours of the day you realize you missed some important stuff that was time critical. After struggling with such crazy days for few months, I finally came up with some tricks to have a more organized day at work. Here goes a few of those;

1. Make use of email client: Whether you are using MS Outlook, IBM Lotus Notes or any other such application as your email client, leverage its functionalities. They have tons of features to help you manage your everyday work. Calendar, tasks, follow ups are the functionality on Outlook, that I make the most use of. The tasks those are time specific and critical, a calendar entry can be set up for those with a reminder, so the message pops up before 15 minutes on your screen. Helps you in two ways; you wont miss things out and have some buffer time in hand. Your calender will show busy to other people, so that they cannot set up another meeting at that time, and you can use the blocked time to finish of your work. Similarly, using follow up in the messages, those need to be addressed at a particular time (after 2 days, at 10 am) or have some other dependency. Or may be, if you are waiting for your DBA's response about some details you asked for; a message sent with follow up pops on their screen.
2. Use a daily planner or PDA (if you are a tech savy): Investing some money on a PDA and some time updating it, never goes useless. If you are stuck in traffic getting late for work you can check your reminders and calendar entries and end up not missing an an important meeting. You can always join the meeting through your cell phone. Or if something comes up when you are at middle of your lunch or away from your computer for some reason, you could probably make use of the contact info or other such minute detail, and respond to a call, without having to go back to work or near your computer.
3. Organize your mailbox. Create folders and sub folders based upon individuals or a group of people or even different applications; whichever works out best for you. Take the backup of your mailbox every month, or may be more frequent if so needed. An organized archive of mails could save you lot of effort on a work. You get into an issue, that you had worked upon several months back, and found the fix after. Now you can just go back to your archive, and get the resolution. If not, at least you would not have to start from the scratch again. And most important, archived mails can work as very good proof at times, and save your butt justifying your claim of doing something (or not for that matter), sometime in past.
4. Utilize the time when you are in some unnecessary meetings (the telephonic ones). Well this might sound a bit rude, but you would agree to me that of the 4-5 meetings you might have in a day, there will be at least one to which you would have been invited just for no apparent reason. You can always decline such meetings, or accept tentatively, but at times you just can not avoid those. Another such type of meeting could be, the meeting would be for one hour, with twenty people invited and your job is done once your questions answered in 5 minutes or so. In such meetings, you can join the call, have the headsets on, put it on mute and do some multitasking; sort out your mails, put some follow ups, reply to few of them, or do some work that does not need you cent percent attention.
5. Talking to people instead of sending a bunch mails; at times I have seen tons of emaila going back and forth among just two people or may be a group of them. Someone needs some clarification, you reply back explaining it, but its not enough for them, they have few more questions, and then some more. Matter worsens if more people involved. Another reason, people do not respond to emails immediately and you cannot blame them, always, they could really be busy. I have seen things getting pushed for days and weeks, due to this kind of communication gap. If that kind of situation arises; just pick up the phone and call the person. At times ten minutes talk is much more fruitful than sending ten emails back and forth. And if there ate more people involved, you could set up a meeting with all those people for 30 minutes or so. Everyone can get together and talk, and get the clarifications they need from each other. Email has its own importance, in communication at work, but a phone call or just going to the person who sits two aisles away from you and talking to him in person does its trick most of the times.

There could be a lot more to add to this. Anyone has anything more to share!