Tip: Using Outlook rules for enhanced organization

This post from blogger Adam Wright is a straightforward How-To which shows you step by step how to utilize Outlook’s rules to organize your emails.

Following Adam’s instructions, I created several rules which enable me to send certain message types into several “Favorite” folders (see screenshot on the next page; these folders appear at the upper left:)

-emails from several sources which track / forecast the economy. I really only deal with these at certain times during each month and don’t need to view them until then or as time permits; there’s no point to having them show up in my In Box

-notices from Concur that I have new expenses to add to expense reports or expense reports to approve (no need to have these clutter my In Box – by glancing at the “Concur Notices” folder, I can tell at a glance if I have work to do in Concur)

-industry news from a number of different sources (I always deal with these messages and the economic forecast material on Friday afternoon – as above, why let them clutter up my In Box?)

-messages from our System Operator (sales data, backorder reports etc.) go into a separate folder. On certain days – particularly after fiscal month end – I get a lot of these… instead of having to move them to another folder, they’re automatically moved to the “System Generated Reports” folder… this way I can deal with them when I wish

-any messages from my peers or anyone from our parent company – I’ll know immediately if I’ve got mail from VIPs in either organization (“Senior Staff”)

…and so on.

All my general email continues to appear in my In Box. I can tell if I’ve received messages which fall into the categories described above at a glance.

This approach, combined with quickly deleting non-essential messages and saving any messages I may have to refer to in the future, enables me to keep my standard In Box very clean – as I left work tonight, I had 12 messages in my In Box and as you can see above, 5 messages in these Favorite folders (I marked those messages “Mark As Unread” so they’d be highlighted in the screenshot.) In a typical day I receive between 60 and 100 messages.

Give Adam’s approach a try – it will definitely add order to Outlook!