Every small business owner, IT Professional, account manager, or really anyone in the business world these days gets email; a LOT of email! This is not news to you. What may be news to you is that there are easy and effective ways to manage your email without installing fancy addons like Xobni or Google Desktop. They're built right into Outlook.
Many people take one of two approaches to handling the deluge of email:
The Architects
You create an intricate structure of folders with hierarchy organized by sender, date, project or some other logical grouping. Then you spend anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes a day creating folders, moving emails, and arranging them. When it's all done, you sit back and enjoy the aesthetically pleasing structure that you have architected.
Just hope that when you're looking for a given email, the property that you chose for your structure is the one that you're using to search with.
Hey Architects! I have news for you:
FOLDERS ARE A WASTE OF TIME!!!
STOP USING THEM!!!
The Ostriches
The other popular method of dealing with email is to leave it all in your Inbox and hope that you can find that needle in the haystack when you need it. Let's call this method the ostrich method because you're really just sticking your head in the sand.
Actually, you may find this surprising, but I find that the ostriches are actually somewhat more evolved than the architects. The ostriches tend to find the "search" capabilities of Outlook rather quickly and train themselves to start typing in the search bar before then even think to reach over to the right for the scrollbar. So if architects are in the 1700s, then the ostriches have discovered the industrial revolution. Progress, but they still haven't reached the 20th century, nevermind current technology.
So what should you do: Organize or Search?
Answer: BOTH!!!
There are two features in Outlook going back to Outlook 97 that not enough people have found: Categories and Rules. That's 12 YEARS people! Grow up! Live a little! Try out the "new" features.
Categories
For those using Gmail, you know everything I'm about to say because categories are really just "Labels" in Google-speak. Categories can be applied to emails to indicate the grouping that they belong in. For example, you can create categories for:
- Projects
- Clients
- Vendors
- Document Types (like invoices, status updates, e-Newsletters)
- Personal vs. Business
Assuming each email is assigned a category (or two, or three), you can easily group them and browse for them. All emails already have a sender/receiver and date/time associated with them, so creating categories for those attributes is redundant.
"But Adam, doesn't that mean that categories are really just folders except without the pretty hierarchy?"
NOT EVEN CLOSE!!!
What categories offer that folders don't are:
1. An email can have multiple categories assigned to it. So if you have an "invoice" from a certain "vendor", you can group it by both properties instead of having to pick one.
2. Your email can stay in the Inbox but already be categorized with pretty colours (that's right, "ou". I'm Canadian).
3. Did I mention the pretty colours?
Suppose I architect a folder hierarchy organized by project. Maybe I even have a subfolder for invoices. I put all invoices from the vendors in the "vendor name"/invoices folder. Now, every time I need to see invoices for that vendor, I just look in that folder. Great.
But now I want to see the invoices from all vendors over the past month. Uh oh. My aesthetically pleasing folder hierarchy just failed me. All that time I spent building folders has actually cost me time because now I have to go through 1 folder per vendor to find all of the invoices. That's an O(n) operation for the Computer Scientists. For the non-computer scientists, it's a waste of time.
Now if I had categories for vendors and "invoices" with all of my email in one big folder, I just change the grouping depending on what type of email I'm looking for.
"But Adam, doesn't it take just as long to assign all of those categories as it does to create folders and drop the emails into them?"
ABSOLUTELY!!!
And that is why we need that second "new" feature called Rules.
Don't run away! You're not going to have to spend two weeks learning an advanced programming language and setting up complicated scenarios and conditions.
RULES ARE EASY!
And you don't have to jump into the deep end. Try this: next time you start a project or start communicating with a new client, take the first email you get, right-click on it, and select "Create Rule".
This next part depends a bit on your situation, but think about the commonalities between the emails you expect to receive from this client or new project; remembering that sender and date/time are already done for you.
Some examples are:
On the next screen, assign a category; create a new one if you have to.
Activate the rule and away you go! Now every time you get an email related to that big project, it is automatically categorized for you.
You have just saved yourself HUNDREDS OF HOURS of categorizing emails as they come in. And for you ostriches, you have added zero work, but are just as organized as the architects. Now every time you receive an email that isn't automatically categorized, create a rule for it. Try to be as inclusive as possible with your rules.
"But Adam, that will take FOREVER!"No it won't. I was receiving hundreds of emails a day and one week after I started this method, 90% of my email was auto-categorized. If you invest 30 seconds upfront, it will literally save you hours of manual organization and search later.
That's ONE HECK of an ROI!
"But do I just leave everything in my Inbox?"
Not even close
Here are the rules:
1. The Inbox is for email requiring action
2. No email stays in your Inbox more than 7 days.
"So where do all the emails go?"
Fine. You architects get to create one glorious folder. This is the last folder you will ever create, so enjoy it! Your folder is called "@All Mail". It starts with
'@' so that it will always appear at the top of the list.
ATTENTION: Stop here if you are in "Inbox camper"
Inbox camping: Process of repeatedly checking your email to see if there is something new to check up on. Especially common as a task-avoidance behavior, and enabled by Outlooks “new post” popup. (http://blogs.msdn.com/ericgu/archive/2004/04/06/108498.aspx)
Now for those disciplined individuals who check your email less than once and hour (see just about every time management book out there), pick one of the following options every time you go through your email or at the end of the day:
1. Grab all emails not requiring action and drag them into the "@All Mail" folder
2. If you like flags (I do), flag the emails requiring action and drag all email from your Inbox into "@All Mail" leaving a beautiful, empty, Inbox.
"But won't Outlook puke with thousands of emails in one folder?"
Maybe. But I've never found that limit. One reason is that I archive any email older than 6 months. For all you pack rats out there who just had a heart attack after reading that last sentence, rest assured I don't delete them. But I do set Outlook to get them out of my working area and out of the way until that odd time when I need to mount the archive.pst folder and search it.
I recommend you do the same or Outlook will eventually slow down to a crawl and you'll post nasty comments on my blog saying that I killed your computer.
"OK smart guy, I did what you said, now I have no folder structure and I need to find my email. What now?"
Now you practice for a week and then check in on Part II: Email Browsing and Searching.
In the mean time, you might also want to think about what you're doing to protect your email from system failure or accidental deletion.
Love it love it!!! I'm an email junkie, so I have to go grab a cuppa coffee and re-read this post while awake, make notes, then subscribe to this very very cool blog!
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