I just returned from a couple weeks of vacation. The sun was great and the rest was even better. But like all vacations, it came to an end and I returned to work on Monday. Waiting for me were hundreds of e-mails. And with meetings and all the work I had to finish, I didn’t have a lot of time to read it. Instead of going through each message, I used a sorting technique in Outlook to save time.

Once I started reading all my e-mail, I realized that nearly all of it was part of conversations that included two or more e-mails. Instead of reading each e-mail, I sorted everything by con