Imagine your mail being delivered to your door and you come home, glance at the envelopes to see who sent them, and then leave them at the door in a pile. Then you continue to do this every day, and the days stretch into weeks and months — perhaps even years.

How would you feel coming home to this mounting pile at your door every day? A bit overwhelming, isn’t it? Where would you begin to organize?

Many of you face this scenario every day, but instead of your physical mail, it is in the form of your email. Consider adopting one of the following tips to help you clear out your Outlook email clutter.

1. Create folders under your Inbox to help sort your incoming mail into categories.

• Right click at your Inbox folder, select New Folder, in the text box of the Create New Folder command box – create a name for your new folder, click on the OK command.

2. Create rules so that Outlook can divert incoming email into designated folders according to who sent them or other criteria appropriate to a specific project or subject.

• Click the Tools option from your Outlook Toolbar, select Rules and Alerts, then E-mail Rules.
• Click New Rule, select ‘Start from a blank rule’, click ‘Check messages when they arrive’.
• Click Next and select an option from the list that is appropriate for the emails you want to divert.
• If an underlined value appears in the Step 2 window, click it to define that option (example – when selecting the option ‘From people or distribution list’, you can designate a specific email you receive messages from).
• After clicking Next, you can continue to define where you want these emails to be diverted to (example – diverted from your Inbox and directly into a specific Folder under your Inbox Folder).
• Give your rule a name in the final set-up window.
• Select ‘Turn on this rule’ and ‘Run this rule now on messages already in “Inbox”‘.
• Click Finish and watch as your Inbox gets cleaned out.

This option is handy for newsletters that you subscribe to and want to keep in a folder to read later and not leave in your Inbox.

3. Flag emails so that you do not forget to follow-up on actions.

• Right click on the email, select Follow up.
• Select Add Reminder and from the Flag to list, select an action like Follow up, Read, or Reply.
• From the Due by list – choose a date to complete this action.

An alarm will sound and a pop-up window will appear to flag you into action.

Note that instructions indicated here relate to Outlook 2003.

Chu’sing a Solution…
Naming conventions for your folders have you creating a word to describe your email contents, which in turn are then automatically sorted alphabetically from A to Z. What if you have a particular project folder that requires top priority and supersedes the traditional A to Z listing under your email Inbox? What if you wanted the folder named Important Project to be filed before the A and not after the H folders? (follow me?)

Name your folder by starting with a symbol like *, or a number. Notice how symbols and numbers are filed before the A to Z convention.

So, now you can create a folder like *Lead Follow-up and have this folder appear as the first folder, right under your email Inbox.