Using Hotmail as a File Cabinet: Turn Your Mailbox into an Online Office

Putting your thoughts into writing can sometimes be very simple to do. More often, however, this process can be frustrating and complex. A common reason for difficulty is due to the challenge posed by organizing ideas. Good writers know that organization is critical to the development of quality material.

A simple way to provide structure to your writing is to use your e-mail account to organize your ideas. If you take advantage of Hotmail as a "file cabinet", you can easily keep track of every element of your writing project.

Hotmail is an ideal place to store your ideas for later reference, because it is an online service. Of course, this means that it can be easily accessed if you are already online doing research for your project. Once you find material that you would like to reference in your project, you can easily copy and paste the valuable information into email documents and send it to yourself.

Of course, Hotmail is also an excellent place to record and refine your creative ideas. To take advantage of Hotmail for this purpose, write a "new message" to yourself and type in only the morsels of information that you want to save -- a title, subject, or idea. Then, send this message to your own email address. (Once you send it, you will instantaneously receive this message as incoming mail.)

You can then continue to develop this idea, or let it sit on the back burner for a few days as you decide whether or not you want to carry it any further. If you choose to add more material to this idea, you can do so by "replying" to the message, and type in new information. You can add as little or as much as you desire to, and you can delete your original message after you have replied to it, if you do not need it anymore. Eventually, the result of your work will be an outline of your writing project, if not the finished project itself.

Advantages of using this message over creating new Word documents for each article idea are:

1.) At a glance, you can view the titles of many of these emails (without having to open them).
2.) The emails are clearly dated, and it's clear to recall where and when your ideas originated.
3.) Reference links to useful sites can easily be placed in the emails, and since you are online, you can open them immediately.
4.) Photographs and other media files can be attached in the emails for later use in your project.
5.) If you wish to seek advice on your ideas, you can easily shoot off the material you've assembled in an email to a friend.
6.) While you organize material for your writing project, you can also take care of other business -- such as checking emails that have been sent to you -- since you are already online.

If you are writing a college essay, a nifty idea is to designate a separate "message" for each paragraph of your work. This will help you to ensure that you have enough space to solidly-research each of these paragraphs on an individual basis, with a separate area for each where you can type quotes or list pertinent online links to documents which will support your thesis.

Organizing your work through emails will save you time and trouble, and will help to clean up your offline work space from the clutter of ideas jotted on scraps of paper.