In Depth: 10 stress-busting tips for managing Outlook email: "
Dealing with emails can be difficult. If your inbox is overflowing, you can easily miss important messages, while responding to lower-priority mail can become a time sink that you could do without.
Taming the stream of incoming mail and reducing the amount of time you spend dealing with it is essential if you're to remain productive. These tips should help you keep on top of your mail, and most work with all versions of Outlook.
1. Get rid of clutter
Avoid using the inbox to store all of your emails. It makes finding specific emails difficult without using a search tool, and important mail can easily be overlooked. Instead, set up some subfolders to sort and store email. Make a folder called Action to temporarily house mails that require you to carry out a task. The folder then becomes a kind of to-do list, and you can remove emails from it as you deal with them.
2. Filing folders
Sometimes an email comes in that requires some action from you, but you have to wait for someone else to provide more information or another response before you can do anything. Create a folder called 'Waiting for' to hold these messages. All other emails will generally be useful for information or archive purposes.
Put these messages into a general storage folder that you can then subdivide into subjects, clients or whatever system works best for you. Your inbox will then only contain mail that has just arrived and hasn't yet been sorted.
The aim is to always have no mail in your inbox because everything has been dealt with or filed. This is known as 'Inbox Zero' in geek circles. You won't always achieve it, but it's a great feeling when you do.
3. Use categories
Inevitably there will be emails that fall under a range of subjects. In Outlook 2007 you can use categories to tag these with their different groupings. To create a new colour category, click the 'Categorise' button on the toolbar followed by 'All Categories' and 'New'.
Now enter the name of the category you want to create and select its colour. You can assign more than one category to each email.
4. Show categories
You can show the Categories column in Outlook 2007 by choosing 'View | Current View | Customise Current View | Fields'. Now select 'Categories' followed by 'Add'. You should be able to see the categories that each email is assigned to by the colour shown in this column.
5. Flag emails
To quickly draw attention to an email, add a flag. In a message list, right-click the email that you want to flag, choose 'Follow Up' and select a flag. You can flag an open email by choosing 'Message | Options | Follow Up' and picking a flag.
When you've dealt with the flagged message, remove the flag by right-clicking on it in the message list and choosing 'Clear flag'.
6. Flag reminders
When adding flags, you can set general reminders for taking action (today, tomorrow, within the week), but you can also set specific dates and times for your reminder to appear. Select a flagged item and choose 'Follow Up' on the toolbar to open the Follow Up menu. Alternatively, select 'Follow Up' from the right-click menu if using an earlier version of Outlook. Click 'Add Reminder' and then enter the date and time you require.
7. Automate your filing
Some emails can be filed without you needing to read them first. For example, marketing information and mailing lists are fairly easy to identify as they arrive. Ideally you want to find this stuff when you have time to read it and not be distracted by it as it arrives.
To avoid this, set up a folder for these messages and create a message rule that will automatically move them into this folder as they arrive in your inbox.
8. Sender rules
You can create a rule based on a message that has already arrived. Right-click the message that you want to use, choose 'Create Rule' and opt to base it on the sender of the message. Tick 'Move the item to folder', select the folder that you want and complete the wizard.
9. Create templates
Rules can take a while to set up and perfect. Save some time by copying similar rules to use as templates. Select 'Tools | Rules and Alerts', highlight the rule that you want to copy, click 'Copy', choose the inbox and click 'OK'. You can now make any changes that you want.
10. Search today's mail
Creating a Search Folder is an exellent way to quickly search today's mail. Choose 'File | New | Search Folder', select 'Create a custom search folder' and click 'Choose'. Call the folder 'Today's mail' and click 'Criteria'. Under the Messages tab, select 'received' and 'today' on the Time dropdown menu before clicking OK.
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(Via Clippings.)
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