Someone I know has this quote at the bottom of all of his emails:
"Just the other day I caught myself wondering who will clean out my Inbox after I'm dead."
-- Charles Petzold
And it is oh so true. But I have to say that it has changed dramatically in the past week!
Since I installed Outlook 2007 on my computer last week, I truly believe it has changed my life. I did not play too much to the betas of Office 2007, so I didn't know what was in store for me. Overall, Outlook hasn't changed a great deal, but the ease in which I can now very categorize emails and tasks and then have those flagged items (by category or date or whatever I want) always be displayed in the Mail view, has changed everything for me. I'm not exaggerating.
I have been flagging emails for a long time, but the flagged emails folder had become a black hole. I had over 500 emails in there going back to 2001. Luckily I had actually attended to most of those things but not because I was checking my “flagged emails“ folder.
Like many, I get so many emails during the day and they come from a huge variety of people on a huge variety of topics. I use the Unread mail view to watch for new emails. Many of these new emails require some thought and response, but I can't constantly drop everything and switch gears. However, once I have looked at them , they disappear from the Unread email folder into another blackhole. I would have to re-mark them as Unread and make sure that they didn't get accidentally marked as Read when I was looking through other new emails. That was an impossible game to win. (So if you are someone who sent me a question about an article or one of these blog posts and I never responded, don't take it personally. I really do try to respond to all questions that are related to anything I have put out in the public, even if they are from total strangers.)
Now when I flag (and categorize) them they don't disappear into the black hole, but stay right in my face along with upcoming things on my calendar.
After cleaning up all of the flagged emails and getting it down to only about 150 (sounds bad, but for me it's awesome), things are really under control. Now when something pops into my inbox that I can't deal with at the moment but don't want to forget, I flag it and when I have a few free minutes, take a look at what's in there and deal with it. Heck, maybe I'll even remember to pay my Amex bill on time next month.
Tasks are also now prominent and included in the same spot as the emails. So now when I have something come up that I need to do later, I just add it into the tasks, give it a category and voila - one less thing to worry about trying to remember!
I even added a few RSS feeds (though only three) to Outlook - something I have never been willing to do before, since my inbox had been so overwhelming.
I also archived old emails for the first time ever. I always feared that they would go into a black hole, too. But that's not the case. A new PST file is created and they are just sent there. So when working in your normal PST file, it isn't bogged down. But the archived stuff is totally at my fingertips and I have gone in there a bunch of times in the past week. The trick to the archive folder is to not forget that extra PST file when you are backing up or moving to a new computer!
I know it sounds like “I drank the Koolaid”, but seriously, a huge weight has been lifted from my shoulders with just this tiny little functional improvement to Outlook. THANK YOU!