Email organisation tips and hacks please!

[FishfingerFlinger]

I’m trying to shake up my email my organisation because at the moment…we’ll it’s not organised at all, I miss emails, I lose track of what I need to respond to, it’s basically chaos.

We have Outlook (use desktop and mobile app), I get anything between 20 and 120 emails on a typical day,

Most of my job is troubleshooting across a wide range of different projects so I’ve never found any value in a detailed filing structure as I might literally have one email about a project and never touch it again. So I just leave it all in inbox. But that’s not working for me.

Please share your tips tips and hacks!

I personally use Categories a lot on my emails.
You can name them whatever you like and then assign each email a category - such as "Action Required", "Pending" or "Info only" type of thing.
You can sort your emails by Category too.
I use the Find Related - Messages in this conversation to pull up all the emails with the same subject header.
Keep the latest one in my inbox if action is still required, and file the rest into a folder.
You can add reminders to emails that have a certain deadline.
If you receive regular emails that you don't need to action - such as Newsletters etc, you can create a rule that these are filed directly into a certain folder, or deleted immediately, or flagged with a category of "info" for example.
You can put a rule that emails from specific people come through in a different font/colour etc so that they stand out.
I personally like to only keep in my inbox, emails that require action/replies and critial info emails. Everything else is filed.
This is all on desktop though as i don't use the app that much.

Setup filters for emails that you get regularly such as newsletters. Delete things like answerphone messages as soon as you have dealt with them. Set aside time on froday to go through and check you havent missed anything.

Set a rule that emails addressed to you only appear in a different colour - they tend to be more urgent than circulars. You could also set a different colour for VIPs e.g. your manager, head of department etc.

Have folders for different projects/categories of information with names that are meaningful to you.

Emails fall into three categories - reply, file, delete. Delete and file can be done straight away, so don't leave them in your inbox. Use your inbox only for emails that are awaiting a reply or action - as soon as they're dealt with, file them or delete them.

Don't be too wary of deleting emails because they're easily recoverable on Outlook.

File or delete your sent items as soon as you've sent them.

If there's an email that's been going backwards and forwards with a chain, you only need to file the most recent email - the others can be deleted.

For emails that need action - you don't necessarily have to keep them in your inbox if there's a long deadline - file the email and move the action to your diary/calendar, with a note of where the email is filed.

I do most the things Arbadacarba said, but not calendar reminders where things are filed. My file system sucks if it isn't intuitive enough to figure out without reminders.

Lots of good ideas

alternative, organise by deadlines.

Friend gets ~200 emails/day. She has auto-filters so she can work thru them in large same-theme groups just once a day.

Our workplace is recommending no sub-folders at all, or maybe very few folders like this, and maybe never delete anything either, just filter to find messages on specific topics. MNers on another thread seemed to say they never deleted, never used folders & just filtered (they had 60,000 unread messages etc). Insisting they didn't lose messages, the Lucy Kellaway strategy: "If it's important they will email me again and personally addressed this time" was what I sensed.

That feels way too reliant on other people to organise my information landscape, to me.

Most of my job is troubleshooting across a wide range of different projects so I’ve never found any value in a detailed filing structure as I might literally have one email about a project and never touch it again. So I just leave it all in inbox.

Have a “miscellaneous” folder, or a “completed” folder or file by issue type is that makes more sense, but don’t leave it in your inbox. I use my inbox effectively as a to-do list. Any email that I’ve responded to/done what was needed is filed or deleted. Any email where I don’t need to do anything yet is snoozed until I need to do something (we use gmail, I don’t know if outlook has this function but basically you snooze it until a set day, then it comes back into your inbox as an unread email - with a flag to say it was previously snoozed). So an email that says “next Monday can you please do xyz” is snoozed until Monday so it’s out of my inbox until then, and I’ll be reminded when it’s time to do it.

These are brilliant, thank you!

I’ve had a quiet week which has enabled me to get on top of my email a bit already, so I’ve siphoned off the few that still need action or follow up. Everything else I’ve moved to archive.

So I’ve got a clean slate to implement some of these strategies - I really like the idea of filing for organising work in progress/action.

I’ve always had a simple system of leaving an email marked as unread if I still need to action it - that works fine when we’re not too busy but If I get overwhelmed and can’t keep up important emails get swamped in incoming junk.

I book a re-occuring slot in my diary every Monday morning for an hour to give me time to go over all my e-mails and make a to do/priority list for the week. It helps to keep on top of things and stop a backlog building up.

I use categories too, so my inbox has three sections. One is for urgent things to respond to, one is for less urgent, and then the inbox at the bottom. I sort emails as they come in. We’re a ridiculously email heavy team so we are constantly on top of our inbox and emails are checked almost as soon as they come in.