A little over a year ago I discovered and wrote about Inbox Zero. As I have been working on an article on using Outlook 2007 productively I thought I’d mention some of the reasons for how I implemented this system and why it works for me.
Email can be, and is often, overwhelming and intimidating. Having an inbox with thousands of messages can be frustrating and demoralizing when it comes time to find anything or start taking action on items. Before I even start describing the how, let me state the why. I use Outlook 2007 at work. When I am at my desk I am never in my inbox, as I prefer the Outlook Today view. So why should I even care if my inbox is a cluttered mess? Because when I check my mail through the web interface I am immediately put into my inbox. The last thing I want to do when I am remotely checking my mail quickly is to wade through hundreds of messages for something possibly important. Also, having some sort of structure for storing emails appeals to me.
The first thing I did was decide how I wanted to sort my mail. The method of sorting will then determine how to set up the folder structure. I decided on a flat level structure, no folders within folders within folders. Visually this appeals to me, things are just easier to find. I then decided I wanted to mainly sort by purpose. Therefore I created a folder for each mailing list I subscribe to. I then created a folder for informational emails, my FYI folder. Those folders alone would not keep my inbox empty, however the purpose of any productivity system should be to increase your productivity not to increase the time you spend managing your inbox. Since I didn’t want to have a lot of folders that require manual intervention like the FYI folder I created one more folder called ‘Saved Mail’. Yes it is generic, and yes it is just a virtual dumping ground, but it is not my inbox.
Since I don’t want to spend all of my email time sorting my mail I set up rules/filters to automatically sort all of my mailing list emails into their respective folders. I also set my junk email settings to what Outlook calls ‘Safe Senders Only’. If I receive an email from someone not on my approved list it automatically goes into my Junk E-Mail folder. After making those settings changes I receive very few emails in my inbox, and the ones that do show up in my inbox are the ones I want to see.
The next step to keeping my inbox empty is to take action on emails when they show up. Since most of the emails that end up in my inbox are either informational in nature or require some action on my part I know I should check those and since all of my other email has been sorted I don’t have important emails buried in low-priority emails. The emails that are informational I move to my FYI folder. Items that require action are handled in two ways. Either I immediately complete the action, such as a question that I can quickly answer in a reply, or I flag it for follow-up. Regardless, once I have read the message I move it to my Saved Mail folder. This is a simple trick, but it works. I purposely did not create a To-Do folder or something similar since I would then have to move things out of that folder regularly as items were completed. In Outlook 2007 when you flag an item for follow-up it adds it to your To-Do Bar automatically, so it doesn’t matter what folder it is in. You can also assign a due date, so it makes it easy to see when you need to take care of the items on your list.
As a result I have found that my email time is much more productive, giving me more time to take action instead of wasting time sorting and reading emails. The only time I now find email overwhelming or a source of stress is when I am away for an extended period of time, but even then it is not as bad as it used to be before I implemented this system.
