Triaging Mail with Categories and Search Folders

An organized mailbox is critical to getting work done, especially if most of your day involves working with Outlook. However, spending more time organizing your mailbox means there’s less time to spend on real work – thus it’s important to find a system that is both simple and efficient.

In this post I will talk about one way you can triage mail using categories and Search Folders. Keep in mind that no single e-mail management method is ideal for all work styles; this is just one method of many and if you’re looking for a change you might want to give this a try and see if it works for you. If you haven’t already, I suggest you install the February Cumulative Update for Outlook 2007, as it has performance updates for Search Folders.

This triaging technique is aimed at quickly working through a long list of e-mail and deciding which e-mails need your attention now, and which ones can wait until later. By the end of this post you’ll know how to triage each new e-mail with a couple quick clicks and you will have easy access to the messages that need your attention throughout the day.

Setting Up your Mailbox

In order for this to work you will need a set of categories that represent what actions you need to take with any given e-mail. In this post I will assume you already have the following categories created (To create categories, go to Edit | Categorize | All Categories, then click New):

• Response Needed – Use this for e-mails that you need to follow up on. If something is extra important it should probably get a response right away – everything else can get this category.
• Read Later – Use this for e-mails that don’t need a response, but should get read eventually.
• Reference – This category will be for e-mails that contain information that will be useful to access easily later.
• Personal – And finally, a category for non-work-related e-mails just to keep them separate from the rest.

You may recognize this set of categories is similar to other mailbox management techniques, like Getting Things Done.

Now let’s set up the search folders you will be using to help manage your mailbox. You will need one search folder for each of the categories above. Here’s how to make them:

Right-click Search Folders in the Navigation pane and select New Search Folder. You will see a dialog like the one on the right.
Scroll down and select Categorized Mail from the Organizing Mail group. Click the Choose… button and select one of the categories above. Click OK.
You need to restrict this search folder to only searching your Inbox (and sub folders) – otherwise it will include messages from your Sent Items and Deleted Items folders. To do this, right-click the Search Folder in the Navigation Pane and choose Customize this Search Folder. Then click the Browse button, uncheck the top box titled “Mailbox”, and check the box next to “Inbox”, like in the picture on the right. Click OK to close the dialogs, and you’re done!

You’ve just created a Search Folder for the first category! Repeat this for each additional category above.

The last search folder we need to create is going to replace your Inbox as the place you look for new mail because you’ll only want to see mail that has not yet been categorized. Creating this search folder is a little more complicated:

Right-click Search Folders in the Navigation pane and select New Search Folder.
Scroll down and select Create a custom Search Folder (it’s at the very bottom of the list). Click Choose... and you’ll see a dialog like the one on the right. Specify a name for this new Inbox like “New Mail” and then click Criteria....
In the Criteria window that pops up click the Advanced tab. From the Fields selection box choose Frequently-used Fields | Categories. Finally, set the Condition to ‘is empty’ and click Add to list. Close the window by clicking OK. You’ve just created a search folder that will show all mail that does not have a category – this will be your new Inbox! Note: it may take a while to build the search folder if your mailbox is large – initially it will contain every mail in your mailbox.
Like before, you need to restrict this search folder to only searching your Inbox (and sub folders). Right-click the Search Folder in the Navigation Pane and choose Customize this Search Folder. Then click the Browse button, uncheck the top box titled “Mailbox”, and check the box next to “Inbox”, like in the picture on the right.

Now there are a few final touches to make this system useable.

• First, add all of these new Search Folders to your Favorite Folders by right-clicking on each search folder and choosing Add to Favorite Folders. Now they’ll be at the top of your Navigation pane and easy to access.
• Next, remove your Inbox from the Favorite Folders area by right clicking it and choosing Remove from Favorite Folders – you won’t need to access this folder directly anymore.
• Finally, you probably have a ton of e-mail in your New Mail Search Folder. There are a couple ways you can get rid of them:

• If your e-mail was already sorted into folders that have purposes like the categories you created above, select all the mail in those folders and apply a category
• If not, you can safely transition to this new system by creating an ‘Old’ category and marking all of your existing mail with this category. This way you’ll be able to start with a fresh ‘New Mail’ folder without worrying about losing that old e-mail – you could even create a search folder for it!
• Of course, if it’s a small amount of e-mail you could categorize it with your new categories.

Alright, we’ve finished with the setup work – now let’s start using this new system!

Quickly Triaging Mail

Whenever a new e-mail arrives it will show up in the New Mail search folder, so you should treat this as a replacement to your Inbox. To triage your e-mail right-click the empty category symbol and apply a category (e.g. Read Later) – that e-mail will immediately leave the New Mail Search Folder and appear in the respective Search folder – quick and easy!

An empty New Mail folder means there’s no new e-mail for you to triage – you’re caught up and can spend time responding to messages (which are already neatly listed in a search folder) or doing other work.

There are a couple ways to work with the ‘Response Needed’ and ‘Read Later’-style folders to track which ones you’ve already seen. You can:

• Use the read/unread status of the mail
• Click the flag icon twice (to make it into a checkmark)
• Delete the e-mail (after you’ve responded to an e-mail, you have a copy in your Sent Items)
• Change its category to something like ‘Done’ (it will disappear from the current folder)

All of these options will work and you should pick the one that best suits your work style.

In this e-mail management system you should aim to keep the New Mail folder empty by applying categories to each message within it – otherwise the system will break down and won’t be useful to you.

That’s It!

I hope you’ll find that this e-mail management system saves you time by making it quick and easy to sort and access your mail in a way that helps you get the most important work done first. Seeing the message counts next to each kind of Search Folder can even help you know how much work you have left.

If you are interested we’ll share additional e-mail management strategies in the coming weeks. Let us know in your comments what you think of this system, how you’ve changed it to best fit your work style, and if you want to hear more!

Tom O’Neill

Outlook Program Manager