Tuesday's Tip #5 - Outlook: Declutter Your Inbox and Organize with ONLY 5 Folders - Part 2

Tuesday's Outlook Tip: Declutter your Inbox with ONLY 5 Folders...REALLY!!!

I know...I know....you're thinking "NO WAY, Kari doesn't understand. I literally have more than 7000 emails in my inbox and probably 250 folders." Oh but I do know. I've seen it all. Admins I've worked with that say things like - I know I have too many items in my inbox (15,000) no lie, executives that say, I don't like to file things because then I can't find them. Also true.  So stay with me....

Is one of your New Year's resolutions or goals to get organized? Mine is. Almost every year - this tip will help you get your email organized once and for all with a system that you can actually keep up.

Let me set this up and tell me if you can relate to either of these scenarios....

Scenario 1 - You can't ever find the messages you're looking for fast enough

You know you just saw that messages, you can't find it, you can't remember what folder you filed it in, you're clicking through folders, sorting and re-sorting your inbox, searching and you can't find it. In fact, as you're looking you're seeing SO many messages that you know you need to delete them - but you'll do that later - but you never have (take) the time....later never comes. Meanwhile-  you've just spent 30 minutes trying to find that message. HELP!!!

Scenario 2 - You had a really good folder system, but you don't have time to file your emails

Last January (or some other time you had a few minutes and were particularly motivated to organize) you setup all the folders you needed, filed all your messages and finally felt organized. You swore you'd file your messages on a regular basis....but here you are - a year (or more) later and you have all the folders but 5000 (or more!) messages in your inbox and a bunch of folders you don't use...HELP!!

The Trick: Use Only 5 Folders

How you ask? This will take some time and we will continue it in next week's blog post too... but trust me - it will so be worth it! Just imagine, an inbox with only a handful of emails, all relevant and action items, a system where you can easily find the emails you need...FAST, less emails in your inbox, an easy to create system to make the filing easy and in some cases...automatic.

When to File

First let's talk about filing and the inbox a little. The inbox should ONLY contain emails that need to have some kind of action. The main actions 

The Key Folders

We will address in detail how to use each of these folders.

1. Reference - This folder would be used for all things you need to save or reference in the future but there is no current action pending on them. This would be all business related messages, project work and emails,  general correspondence you may need to refer to, etc.
2. Management - Depending on your job, you would use this folder for all things "employee/direct report management". This could be reviews, personnel items, hiring, job description etc. Again this would be things you need to "keep" but do not have any action on them now.
3. Subscriptions - You would keep newsletters, industry association lists, company email updates/newsletters, blogs. The idea with this folder is to have a place to file things you subscribe to but don't need to see immediately. It could be internal committee minutes, to weekly email updates from the CEO, to newsletters you subscribe to as part of your industry or job.
4. Personal - Pretty self explanatory but anything that is personal that you need to keep or reference.
5. Meetings/Auto Replies (Optional) you may not even need this one but if you are someone that organizes a lot of meetings and/or sends lots of emails to large lists - you likely get lots of auto responses and/or meeting responses. This is a folder that would hold all of those. In this series - we will review how to create these rules.
6. Archives (Optional) you may not need this one either. This is used by some people as a place to keep all the folders they are going through to file and/or delete.

Challenge - Set aside an hour on your calendar right now to setup these 5 folders and start getting all your messages into these 5 (ish) folders. If you're not buying it yet - wait until next week and I promise I will sell you on how you will find all the messages you need, when you need and even anticipate these searches so they're already done for you!