Effortlessly Organize Your Microsoft Outlook Email

How organized you are has a direct correlation to time management. According to the Wall Street Journal, office workers waste an average of 40% of their day due to lack of organizational skills.

With a good deal of that workday time spent reading and responding to emails, applying organization to your Outlook inbox can make a big difference in productivity and time management.

Often, companies looking for modern IT solutions adopt applications that can help them streamline and reduce wasted time, but to get the full benefit from apps like Office 365 and Outlook, it’s important to know the secrets of good organization and how they can help you achieve it.

The average person spends 28% of their workday reading and replying to email.

Our BrainStomp team has put together some of our favorite ways to effortlessly organize your Outlook email and become a master of efficiency.

Tricks for Saving Time witth Outlook Organization

These tips can help even the most unorganized person find more time in their day by spending less of it searching for things in their inbox. Try out these tips and see for yourself!

Use Outlook Folders

Creating personal folders in Outlook allows you to easily separate your mail by category or subject, making it much easier to find that last email from that big customer or review online purchase receipts.

You can use them in multiple ways to save time, here are two:

• Have all mail come into your inbox, then once addressed, move it to the appropriate subject folder.

• Automate incoming messages based upon sender or subject line to automatically move from your inbox to the appropriate folder.

In the left pane of Outlook, right-click where you’d like to add the folder and click New Folder, add the name and press Enter.

Add Color Codes with Categories

Reduce time searching through your inbox by using categories to color code according to subject. It will help you instantly spot a message of a particular type.

Color categories also help you stay organized across other Outlook items and will impact:

• Email messages

• Notes

• Contacts

• Appointments

From an email message, you can right-click the message and select Categorize, then select a category from the list.

Create categories by going to the Tags group on the top ribbon and select Categorize > All Categories. In the Color Categories dialog box, select New.

Let Quick Steps Organize for You

You can set up Quick Steps in Outlook to give you an additional helping hand when it comes to your email organization. It’s a big time-saver and can eliminate hours spent trying to sift through an inbox that’s become overwhelmed.

You can use any number of automations in a Quick Step, here are some of the defaults that Microsoft provides for you to get started.

• Move a message to a specific mail folder and mark it as read

• Open a reply to a message and delete the original message

• Forward a message automatically to others on your team or to your manager

You can create a Quick Step by selecting Home, then in the Quick Steps group select the More arrow. This opens the Manage Quick Steps dialog. Select a Quick Step or select one to change and click Edit.

You’ll see multiple options to use for actions that you can combine together so they execute in one click.

Use Focused Inbox to Designate Important Mail

A handy organizational feature that splits your inbox in two is called Focused Inbox. What it does is create two different inbox tabs, Focused and Other. In Outlook for Windows the Focused Inbox is available for Office 365, Exchange, and Outlook.com accounts.

You can use the View tab to easily tab between your Focused Inbox and Other, so you can keep more important messages grouped together in one place. You can easily move messages between the two inboxes when needed and set all messages from a particular sender to automatically come into your Focused Inbox.

Delete Redundant Messages with Conversation Cleanup

Do you have multiple messages with much of the same information due to replies back and forth? An easy way to reduce your inbox clutter is through the Conversation Cleanup tool in Outlook.

When you use Conversation Cleanup it will evaluate the contents of each message in a specific conversation, and if a message is completely contained in another message, it will move it to your deleted items.

To use it, go to the Home tab and in the Delete group, click Clean Up.

You can then choose from the following options:

• Clean Up Conversation

• Clean Up Folder

• Clean Up Folder & Subfolders

You also have flexibility in setting specific commands, such as to never delete a flagged message.

Find More Time-Saving Tricks with BrainStomp

The BrainStomp team is all about technology optimization and we can help your office reduce wasted time and make the most of the applications you’re using to positively impact productivity and your bottom line.

Schedule a free technology consultation today! Call 260-918-3548 or reach out online.