Almost all of e-mail wisdom can be put in three concise lines:
Keep unwanted stuff from getting in
Classify into what needs action and what doesn’t
For the items that do need action, have a consistent plan; those that don’t, put them where they should be.
Perhaps we should add a fourth concise line:
BACK UP OFTEN
You should formulate a policy for yourself to keep things in order, but we’ll tell you a couple of things just so you’re aware that you don’t have a proper policy in place!
First off, constantly being alerted of new mail is a distraction. We’ve gotten used to it, but ask yourself if you really need outlook to check for mail every five minutes- and whether you need to be notified each and every time. Chances are you don’t. You’ll deal better with e-mail if you give it a time and a time-slot. (only you can decide whether you need that to be twice a day or six times.) It’s a generalized suggestion, but how about choosing to only be alerted to important mail – that is, mails from a certain sender, or those with a certain subject line?
Now, for when you do sit down to “deal” with your mail, you can reduce some of the clutter immediate: look at the list of unread e-mails and quickly respond to those that demand just a couple of lines. Let hose not remain on the list-and in your head. To educe the clutter a little more, delete what you’re not never going to deal with. Accept it: you’ve got a hoard of e-mails that you’re never, ever going to respond to or take some action upon, but they’re there. Learn to decide what items belong in this category, and delete them when they arrive.
Well, here’s a gentle way out (because we know it hurts): spend some time right now and move all such items to a newly-created folder (more on this later ), then delete them forever . three months down the line, look back on whether you needed them! Cases in point : forwards you’re not going to read. Newsletters you’re not going to read. Social networking requests you’re not going to respond to……
Of course, keeping spam out is rather more than half the story. We’ll come to that part in just a while.
FOLDER AND FILES
If you’ve never bothered to organize your outlook folders and have left them at the default, you probably have one very large file that contains all your mails. This .PST file (like we said) could get corrupted, and outlook could take longer to open .then there’s the matter of good organization: if you split your mail into multiple .PST file, you can choose to open only the one(s) you want-and you’ll see them listed separately in the folder list on the left. If you have sub-folders, you’ll get smaller lists when you expand a particular folder than if you had one, large folder.
Let’s take a typical scenario and say you have three kinds of mails-work, personal, and newsletters. Right now, they’re all in one. PST file ( unless you’ve archived some of them) . what you need to do is create two more. Go to file > new > outlook Data file. Supply a filename, and you’ll get the options to set a password for it, and to name it . this –say “personal” is what will show up in outlook. To avoid confusion, you should keep the filename and this name the same.
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