Outlook Inbox Optimization

Since I started a new job, and don't yet have a flood of emails streaming in, I decided to take some pre-emptive steps to manage my inbox.  I'm using three different techniques--Some things I implimented at my previous job, some are new, so I'm not sure whether they will need to be modified to work well together, or if they will compliment eachother.  I will follow up after a couple weeks once I know how much I use them.

 

1. Priority Coloring

I've used this for years, and it really makes it easy to sift through a busy inbox.  Using autoformatting, you can specify that messages be different color based on how they reached you.  From highest specificity to lowest:

• Messages only to me are blue
• Messages to me and others individually are black
• Messages I am CC'ed on, or that are to my group are dark grey
• Messages to the entire company are light grey

This gives you an easy at-a-glance indicator as to how important it is that you react to the message.  New messages coming in are usually bolded, so they retain the coloring.

 

2. Sent mail in inbox

I set up a rule to copy any sent mail to my inbox.  This way, I can sort by subject line and see the whole conversation thread.  If your version of Outlook isn't smart enough to know that "RE: Lunch Room" goes with "Lunch Room," then you can pull up the field chooser and sort by Conversation instead.  This rule by itself is very convenient, but actually works a little bit against my next technique, but I'm still able to make good use of it.

 

3. Zero Inbox

As a goal, this technique immediately sorts all incoming email into folders, and gets them out of your inbox.  I read about this on lifehacker, where Gina Trapani links to the originator (which I've forgotten at the moment), who originally crafted a 5 folder sort system.  Gina went even further, making to mergers to simplify to a 3 folder system.  I'm not sure I'm ready for that amount of streamlining, so I'm going with a 4-folder system:

 

• Respond - Any emails that can be responded to in less than 5 minutes.  Anything that can be responded to in less than 1 minute, just do as it comes in and don't bother to file it.  Gina merged this with Action and called the whole thing "Follow up".
• Action - Any emails that require more than 5 minutes of work to respond to, or that have work instructions.  Marking active tasks unread as you place them in this folder give you a running tally of currently active tasks, is a way to keep yourself aware of this folder's contents.
• Archive - Long term reference message storage.  This folder can have sub folders by category if desired, although since it is searchable that is probably not needed.
• Temporary Hold:  Stuff that requires no action, but that you want easily accessible.  Examples would be tracking numbers, order confirmations, or other stuff you might be referring to over the next week or so.
• Trash - Yes, I know this is a fifth folder, but it's one that is already there.  Delete visciously.  Anything that doesn't go in one of the top four folders, or anything from those folders that you are done with and don't need to move to archive, gets deleted.

Because I have my sent message copying turned on, I disposition my own messages just like I would anyone elses (am I promising to do something, am I sending out information I would like a permanent copy of?).  This lets me keep a running conversational record of the exchanges.

 

It's actually ridiculously easy to impliment all of these techniques, so much so that it is a little frustrating that they aren't turned on by default.  If anyone is curious about them, just poke around in the "organize" menu, and you can see the rich available options for the (separately grouped for some reason) Rules Wizard and Auto Formatting.