I receive upwards of 100-150 emails per-day and a lot of people have asked how I manage my inbox. Someone asked me again on my last conference trip and I promised to write this up in a blog post - something I've meant to do for some time now!
For email I use Microsoft Outlook 2007 and Microsoft Exchange. As much as I complain about Outlook it's very much a love/hate relationship. Outlook is always the first application in my tray (followed by a web browser). The latest Office update was very disappointing for me as I was really expecting to see some new innovative things. In my opinion Outlook presents such a great opportunity to innovate in the Office platform and I don’t get why that hasn’t happened. Nevertheless, Outlook still provides the best tool for me for managing all my mail.
My tips & tricks that I've picked up for dealing with lots of email really have all come from other people - I've just combined a lot of them together. They are surprisingly straight-forward and simple too.
Do you use Clear Context?
No, I've tried Clear Context. While I believe it's intent is to do much of what I prescribe it's not nearly as aggressive as I like; although I know plenty of people that it works perfectly for.
What about SPAM and unsolicited email?
People are constantly worried about publishing their email address and getting SPAM. While it's true that you may get more SPAM it doesn't take a whole lot of work to get your name on a spammers list.
I've published my email address publicly (now rhoward@telligent.com) for years. It's actually something I started doing as an evangelist when I was at Microsoft. I remember lots of my friends at Microsoft being shocked that I would publicly give out my email address; now it's common practice there too!
As for getting unsolicited emails, sure I get a lot. I used to get a lot more when I was at Microsoft. Mostly from developers that needed help with a problem that they couldn't solve. But it was never a burden - I've found that even after publishing my email address the amount of incoming email never changed significantly. People still tend to be pretty respectful of what is appropriate to email.
Outlook Best Practices (IMHO)
When it comes to managing my inbox I make use of Outlook Rules, Folders, and Views extensively. I also communicate to everyone the I work with that I treat email where I'm on the to: line and email where I'm on the cc: line completely differently. If it's important and you want me to look at it put me on the 'to:' line, otherwise I don't even promise to read it.
Rule #1 - Only 'to:' mail gets to the Inbox
My mailbox has a folder called "__cc: Rob Howard" any emails that I am cc:ed on are moved by a rule to this folder. I'll scan through emails that I'm cc:ed on several times a day but that's about it. In other words I'll scan the subjects, read the ones that look interesting, and then delete everything or move interesting items to my "Sent Items" folder (more on that in a minute).
Only email that is sent directly to: me (and not from a distribution list or other automated source) ends up in my actual inbox. You would be amazed at how much noise this removes.
Rule #2 - An inbox for internal and an inbox for external
Email that is sent to me from people in our Global Address List (GAL) and email that is sent to me from people not in the Telligent GAL is also treated differently.
If an email is to: me but comes from someone within the Telligent GAL it ends up in my main Inbox. If an email is to: me but comes from someone not found in the GAL it goes to a folder called "_Inbox (Customers)".
Again the idea here is to help prioritize what I'm looking at. Below is a screen shot to show how this is organized (note, I just got finished cleaning it up for the day too - so most of these email arrived in the last 45 minutes):
Note, the use of the underscores in front of folders is only to control the sort order.
Rule #3 - A rule for everything else
All other email, whether from an internal list such as our Telligent Product Discussion List, other external email lists such as those from ASPAdvice.com, Google Alerts, Twitter notifications, Facebook notifications, and just about anything else I can create an Exchange rule for moves mail to a set of folders.
This keeps the noise from all the various discussion lists that I'm part of out of my inbox.
I also use an explicit "Delete" rule. Some mail just doesn't get stopped by Postini or get flagged as junk. Those sends get moved to by my "Delete" rule directly to the deleted items folder.
Rule #4 - Conversation View
Outlook has a view option called "Conversation View" to enable it just right click on the header of the mail grid and select "Customize Current View" and select "Conversation"
Conversation view organizes threads together. So if a reply comes in for a thread that is already in your inbox you get to see all threads together:
Rather than reading every message separately you can read all the messages together, delete older ones and only keep the most recent (something I do often), or just delete the whole thing.
Rule #5 - Read, Unread, Delete, or Archive
Outlook has flags for setting different status information about emails it also supports follow-up notifications. I don't use any of these. Instead all email exists in one of 4 states:
- Read - Email that is marked as 'read' in my inbox is considered 'completed'. It's either going to get moved out to an archive or deleted. If I read an email and need to go back an take action on it I leave it's state 'unread'.
- Unread - Email that requires action. For example (from the image above) I can quickly glance at my inbox at any moment and know that I have 7 actionable emails from people within Telligent and 29 from customers.
- Delete - I keep mail for about 3-4 weeks in my "Deleted" folder anything older than that I delete every Monday.
- Archive - see below:
Rule #6 - Archive and Search
Anything that I send or anything that I want to keep I move to my "Sent Items" folder. Every couple of months I move everything from Sent Items to a backup PST file organized by year (each year gets a new PST file). I'll even occasionally move other mail that I have read and want to save there too.
I use Google Desktop and Windows Desktop search to index all my old email. So far, no complaints with either (and I haven't picked a winner).
I'm sure I forgot something so I'll update this post if there is anything else to add!