Make the New Year great with a better organized Inbox

This post is provided by Roby Kurian.

Hi, I'm Roby Kurian, Product Manager for Outlook. I hope you enjoyed the holidays. Now that the holidays are over and the New Year is here, have you made your New Year's resolutions? I make New Year's resolutions almost every year. I have four resolutions for 2011 and one of those is to be better organized. I feel good about that particular resolution because I already have a good start. I managed all the unread emails in one of my largest folders. Let me explain my approach.

Within Microsoft there are many Contact Groups for people with similar interests. One of my interests is photography and I am a member of Microsoft Photography Club's Contact Group that has 2,403 members. It is a very active group with dozens of messages every day. For the last few months I couldn't keep up with the volume of messages resulting in about 3,200 unread emails in my Photography folder. I didn't want to carry all those messages into 2011. This is how I approached the challenge.

Rules and Folders

I already had a rule to move all the messages sent to the Microsoft Photography Club to a dedicated folder so that those messages didn't interfere with my work. It's easy to create email rules and folders in Outlook 2010. Creating a rule takes only three clicks. Even if you're using an earlier version of Outlook, you'll find similar rules functionality.

For more about creating rules see our previous Outlook blog post. If you're a master of creating rules, leave a comment and let us know how many rules you have and any best tips.

Magic of Cleanup

When I started, I had about 3,200 unread emails in my Photography folder. The Clean Up command helped me reduce the count by 35% in four seconds.

The Clean Up command evaluates the contents of each message in a Conversation. If a message is completely contained within one of the replies, the previous message is deleted.  After running Clean Up, I had about 2,100 unread messages. For more about Clean Up and other new features see our previous Outlook blog post.

Search and Delete

Next, I used Instant Search in Outlook 2010 to do custom searches. A lot of conversations in the photography club are people buying and selling items. Most of these messages have subject lines that begin with "FS" (for sale) or "WTB" (want to buy). Since I am not interested in buying or selling anything, I searched for messages with FS or WTB in the subject line and deleted those messages. There are also many conversations specific to photography equipment. Since I use a camera from one brand, the conversations specific to other brands are not relevant to me. So I searched for emails with subject lines containing other brand names and deleted those messages too. These searches quickly reduced my unread messages by another 800 messages to 1,300. To learn more about Instant Search, see my previous blog post.

View as Conversations

The previous steps took me only a few minutes. Whenever I have to go through a large volume of messages, I use Conversations view. Conversations view displays all messages within a conversation together as group.

Conversations view helped me quickly look at a topic and decide if I should review those messages. If I were to look at those messages individually, it would require me to read a lot of redundant messages. Usually, the latest message in a conversation contains the previous messages and replies. For example, the conversation below about studio lighting had seven unread messages. Since I was not interested in that topic, I could delete the whole conversation without reviewing those seven messages sent at different times.

Ignore Conversations

There were some topics I was not interested in, and knew that if there were any additional messages sent on that topic, I didn’t want to read them. So instead of simply deleting the conversation, I used the Ignore command. All of the existing messages, as well as any future messages in the conversation are automatically moved to the Deleted Items folder.

By ignoring conversations I’m not interested in, I’m helping to reduce unwanted messages that I’ll have to manage in 2011.

Of those 3,200 messages, I ended up keeping only 82. I hope some of the ways I’ve managed to catch up on my messages have given you inspiration and ideas on how to better manage your pile of unread messages.

Now that I’m caught up, here are some ways I plan to help reduce the time managing messages in the New Year.

1. Use conditional formatting to highlight messages sent only to me and give priority to those messages. This helps me prioritize which messages I need to look at first.
2. Create more rules to automatically move Contact Group messages to folders. I’ll review those messages less frequently.
3. Try not to have more than 30 unread emails in my Inbox at any time.
4. Identify tasks that I repeat most, and then create Quick Steps for those.

How do you keep your Inbox organized? Do you have a favorite method not mentioned here? Let us know how you manage a busy Inbox by leaving a comment below. I wish you a great 2011!

-- Roby Kurian, Senior Product Manager, Microsoft Outlook