Outlook Organization Addendum

Addendum:  After using the system briefly, I decided to adopt the full 5-folder system, at least for now.  The difference between a "Temp Hold" and a "Waiting for Response" is significant enough that I think it warrants its own folder.  Plus, the Waiting has so far been my most used folder, as whenever I send action requests to others, I drop my sent mail in there, so I can keep track of any pending requests.

 

In this case, I don't actually have any truly 'unread' messages.  What I do have is nothing in my inbox (yay!), one item that requires action (that I have marked 'unread' so it will show up on the folder), two items that require quick responses (both marked 'unread' after getting dropped in the Respond folder), and one item I'm waiting for a response on (my 'copy sent into inbox' rule automatically marks my sent messages unread as it copies them, so I just dragged it into 'waiting').  This system has been so far quite suitable for dealing with everything that has come in. 

 

You can see by the Plus sign that I have some Archive subfolders...so far they are Reference and CYA, but if something that I feel like I want to save long term doesn't fit nicely in one of those, I'm not afraid to just let it live in the main archive until I see a large enough trend develop to deserve a subfolder.

 

The hardest part of the system is viciously and immediately deleting things that don't fit in one of the five categories.  It is totally worth the effort, though...not to mention outlook will never get bogged down.  At my previous job, my inbox had 5800 messages in it, for no particular reason, I had just never thought to delete anything.  In this system, I will never run out of mailbox space, and if my archive somehow gets large enough to get close, well, I have an easy choice of which folder to archive locally.

 

The folder system is actually streamlined enough that it makes my color formatting obsolete.  I'd have to be getting truly epic volumes of mail to have enough stuff in my inbox at one time to need to visually distinguish between them.