An Email Organization Scheme for Outlook 2007: How I Efficiently Triage Email

I process a lot of email. (Beautiful pixels take a lot of email to make these days.)

Many emails are in conversation threads. Some emails are very important, and must be responded to, while others I can soak up when I have time or choose to skip over.

I'll discuss the system I use in Microsoft Outlook 2007.

Here's what it looks like:



The mechanics of it:

• I leave email marked Unread until I explicitly mark it read (CTRL-Q)
• I turn off automatic marking as read (Menu: Tools: Options: Other Tab: Reading Pane...)
• I flag message for Follow Up (with times, e.g. Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, or a specific date).
• I read email from the "Unread or For Follow Up" folder.
• (You'll find this under your Mailbox tree, in "Search Folders")
• This displays all messages not yet read, or flagged for follow up.
• I use a custom view:
• Make a a new view by copying one and making changes
• Menu: View: Current View: Define: Copy "Messages with Auto Preview"
• Group By...
• (set "Select available fields from" to "All Mail fields")
• Start Date (Ascending)
• Importance (Descending)
• In Folder (Ascending)
• Conversation (Ascending)
• Sort...
• (set "Select available fields from" to "All Document fields")
• Category (Ascending)
• Received (Ascending)
• (say "No" when closing window and asked if you want to show Category field)
• Other Settings
• Auto Preview: Preview unread items
• Reading Pane: Right
• Automatic Formatting...
• Only Me
• Condition: Where I am "the only person on the To line"
• Font: Underline
• I make important email folders "Favorites"
• Our teams use many public folders, and I make them favorite folders for the ones I track
• (You must make the public folder a favorite public folder, then a favorite email folder)
• I use several rules to presort items
• Route emails to topic specific folders whenever possible
• e.g. sales staff, partner companies, email lists
• Flag items for follow up later
• e.g. items I need to review weekly are flagged "next week"
• Delete means "trash it, I don't need it any more, but just in case keep ~6 months of deleted items"
• I purge deleted items manually
• My Inbox means "I haven't bothered to sort this", and accumulates lots of email
• I don't read out of the inbox, so it doesn't matter much if it builds up
• I do periodically move everything in the inbox to a folder "_save-generic"

Now, how do I use this?

• Emails arrive and I triage them.
• I select the "Unread or For Follow Up" folder.
• I hit the Home key to get to the top.
• I scan over the large pile of unread messages, and first at a quick glance:
• Delete anything obviously not important.
• Move to Folder anything that should be sorted
• This greatly improves grouping of items in this "Unread or For Follow Up" view, beyond just filing things away for later.
• I use the toolbar icon which remembers the most recent folders I've put things into.
• Mark as read (CTRL Q) anything trivial I can ignore .
• Flag for follow up anything substantial I can't handle right now.
• Tomorrow, this week, next week, or a specific calendar day if needed..
• Anything remaining I need to handle right now.
• I flag these by just clicking on the "flag", which is effectively "Today".
• My email I should handle is now all sorted by a follow up date.
• I hit F5 to refresh the view - hiding all messages marked Read and with no flag.
• After triage, emails are displayed in groups sorted by the time frame I need to review them.
• I read emails, and after doing so mark them as read, leaving them flagged if I still need follow up.
• As emails are dealt with, I delete them if appropriate, or click their flag to mark them as complete (which removes them from this list).
• I can easily push items futher away in time if I'm getting backed up, or "read ahead" if I'm ahead of things

The major benefits:

• I can easily push items into the future and not deal with them right now - they'll come back to my view at an appropriate time.
• Long conversations are all grouped together, automatically. And they can easily be hidden/rolled up from the view.
• I can easily sort several emails into folders, which groups them together in my view. Thus related emails can be grouped together, even when they have unrelated subjects lines.
• Public folders allow me to go to that topic at an appropriate frequency (every few hours, daily, weekly), and making them favorite favorites makes them easy to see.
• New High Importance emails are at the top of the list, while ones I've look at can be pushed down for later.
• Emails will never "fall through the cracks".

The shock to new users:

• The email view is padded out vertically quite a bit.
• True, but the sorting and grouping benefits are worth it when you're tracking dozens to hundreds of emails.
• You get used to it pretty quickly.
• For select folders I use a different view that has 1 email per line. You can always toggle 2 views for your need.
• Explicitly marking all emails as read is a pain.
• Multi-select and marking entire conversations read at a time helps.
• This is what keeps emails from falling through the cracks.

- thanks technabob.com for the cc image of the hamster shredder.