Microsoft Office

From the Office Outlook Blog: The Living in Outlook series is about sharing tips and workflows around real-world scenarios.

Because I am usually juggling several projects at once, my Inbox tends to become cluttered with e-mail and meeting requests related to the different things I’m working on.

The Color Categories feature has been incredibly useful for organizing and triaging my incoming mail. I have Color Categories defined for each project that I am working on, this way I can quickly tag meetings or mail.

Not only is the color of the item now a visual cue, but the categories are another layer of context that can be used to group items and search over them. Check out this post on time management for more details about using Color Categories.

My trick to optimize this process is to use rules to automatically categorize my incoming mail. This way, it is already tagged with the appropriate category when I get it and I can easily know the context of the mail without having to open it!

It only takes a few steps to set this up.

1. Define Your Categories.

The first step is to customize the categories that you want to assign. Right click on any mail item and click All Categories under the Categorize menu.
From the Color Categories dialog you can create custom categories for every project or topic relating to your mail.

2. Set Your Rules.

From the Rules wizard (Tools | Rules and Alerts | New Rule) select “Check messages when they arrive” under the “Start from a blank rule” heading, and click Next.

Here’s where you get to be creative! The criteria you use to categorize your mail are up to you, and they really depend on the format and types of mail that you receive. I set my rules based on three major criteria:

Specific words and phrases in the subject of the message
Specific words and phrases in the body of the message
Any message from a distribution list

Setting Up Your First Rule

1. Define the Conditions

Select the checkbox next to with specific words in the subject.

Click on the specific words link, and type in the words or phrases that are of interest to you.

I would recommend using multi-word phrases in order to minimize the number of false positives captured by the rule. Make sure you include quotations to match the entire phrase only. Click Add to commit each phrase you enter to the rule.

2. Set the Category

Once the list is created return to the Rules wizard and click Next. Select assign it to the category from the actions list. Click the Category link to choose the category you wish to assign.

Once the rule is complete you can retroactively run it on your entire inbox. Now all of your incoming mail is automatically tagged for easy organization. If you define multiple rules, the Color Categories will be applied in the order they are listed in the Rules Wizard.

This is by no means a perfect science so you may have to adjust your rules and criteria until you find the right combination for the e-mail you receive. With the right set of categories and rules you can demystify your inbox and have a customized and automatic organizational system.