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How do you manage your Inbox

There’s many ways you can arrange your Inbox in Outlook.

Whenever we look at the Outlook setup used by other people, two things are striking.

One is that few people change the default layout provided by Microsoft to something that suits them. We’ll look at that another time.

The other thing is the different ways people arrange their Inbox, often without changing the Microsoft defaults or making use of Outlook features.

In this article we’ll suggest some options you might try, not all of them will suit everyone and many people will prefer to stick with their habits. That’s OK because there’s no right way to use the Inbox – but there might be some better ways to consider.


Unread messages as ‘to do’ list.

By default, Outlook marks a message as ‘Read’ as soon as it’s viewed in the reading pane. Some people don’t like that behavior because they use read/unread as an informal marker of whether there’s some action to be taken. Only when the message is ‘unread’ has the email been replied to or other action done.

The Unread Messages view in Outlook then lets you see just those messages.

To change Microsoft’s default behavior, go to Tools | Options | Other | Reading Pane and Uncheck the choice ‘Mark item as read when selection changes’.

Outlook - mark item when selection changes image from How do you manage your Inbox at Office-Watch.com


Flag

You can flag a message with a reminder, simply right-click on a message and choose ‘Follow Up’ then a date.

Outlook follow up image from How do you manage your Inbox at Office-Watch.com

We’ve already written about using this on order confirmation emails to follow up on orders you’re expecting to be delivered and the same techniques can be used for any kind of forward reminder.


Keeping past emails

In our humble opinion, too many people are too quick to delete past emails.

Outlook and modern computers can handle extremely large amounts of data – far more than most people can collect even after a decade or more. So you should be able to let Outlook accumulate well over 100,000 messages without a problem.

Why keep messages? Because even personal Inboxes contain a lot of information that may be handy in the future – handy in unexpected ways. These days many bills, orders, travel bookings and other transactions are handled by email. That information can be useful even years later.

Many times at Office-Watch.com we’ve searched for Outlook messages from years ago to find essential details – details that would have been lost if ‘old’ emails were deleted.

Since Outlook can handle lots of emails, why not let it do so? Outlook’s ‘Instant Search’ isn’t really ‘instant’ but it’s pretty fast.

I know there’s an urge to ‘tidy up’ from the days of paper filing but computer storage and searching makes that less necessary.


Use Outlook Search

Searching through past messages, both received and sent was made easier with integrated search in Outlook.

Above the Inbox list is a simple search pane, just type in some words and the matching messages will appear. In this real-life example, we’re looking for the name of a Venice hotel used by ‘Phil’ a friend many years ago. A three word search was enough to find his email from 2005.

Outlook samppe search image from How do you manage your Inbox at Office-Watch.com


Arranging into folders

A time-consuming but, in our view, mostly unnecessary task is moving emails to sub-folders by topic. I know this will be controversial with some people who have done this for years.

Outlook search means you can find messages quickly from the Inbox without the need to move them around.

Recent versions of Outlook have ‘Search Folders’ which are saved and automatically updated searches that appear like separate folders.

For example, instead of having a separate folder with your mobile phone bills leave them in the Inbox and use a search folder finding messages with the name of your carrier (AT&T, Virgin, Vodafone etc).

 

However you arrange your email, make use of Outlook’s features to save your time and make your Inbox more efficient.

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