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As summer holidays draw to a close, and staff come back to find their inboxes full of mostly junk e-mail, I thought it may be time to write a post about e-mail organization. It also follows Bradley's "Do You Treat your E-mail as Evidence" post with some practical tips for e-mail management.
Now, I will be the first to admit that e-mail administration is not my favorite thing to do, but Outlook 2003 has some good tools that help even the most organizationally challenged individual.
Here are a few tips you can take advantage of:
Create multiple inboxes. Just like a filing cabinet has more than one filing folder, your inbox can have more than one place to store e-mails as well.. Choose an organization structure that works for you. For example, each client that I work with has their own inbox in my Outlook. That way, if I am looking for an e-mail from a specific client, I can just look in their folder. To do this in Outlook 2003, Go to File | Folder | New Folder. Type a name for your new folder, and choose inbox.
Use rules to keep your primary inbox clear. Using the "Rules and Alerts" feature in Outlook, you can predetermine where your messages are delivered based on who sent them to you, the subject line, what words they contain etc...To use this feature, click on Tools | Rules and Alerts. The wizard will step you through the rest.
Use colours to categorize messages. Go to Tools | Organize | Using Colours. Using colours helps important e-mails stand out in the sea of e-mail that you receive each day.
Use follow up flags for reminders. Similar to the use of colour coding messages, you can flag your messages that require further response or action. This allows you to quickly sort through the e-mail mass and get to what is important. To use this feature, click on the follow up (red flag) on the toolbar when you have an e-mail open.
Use the delete key. It seems obvious, but I don't know how many times I have looked at an inbox with a lot of "OK" or "I agree" one line messages (I am guilty of this as well). I find the easiest way to get rid of a lot of e-mail is to sort your messages by who the message is from, and then delete whole chunks of messages at once. To use the sort feature, choose View | Arrange By | and then pick a choice from the list.
These are just a few tips to get you started. If you have any further organizational tips for managing your inbox that you would like to contribute, feel free to post a comment below.
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