How to categorize emails in outlook 2013
Bills that you don’t want to pay right away.
You can put tax documents in here or other things that you don’t need to take care of right away. This category is for all the things you need to do, but in the future.
How to categorize emails in outlook 2013 pdf#
Remember all those emails and newsletters and PDF attachments you need to read? Put them in this category so you can get a cup of coffee and sit down to read them all at once. You can use rules to categorize emails automatically so unimportant emails such as social media notifications or emails you’re cc’d on can appear in the notifications category. That’s not very actionable, I know, but this category is best paired with Outlook rules. Notifications is going to be for items you need to be aware of. Similar to the category above, create a category for each major project you’re working so you can keep making progress on it. You’ll need to create a 1:1 category for each person you work with on a regular basis. You’ll put things into this category if you want to remember to address them the next time you meet with that person. 4 1:1 with _person’s name_ġ:1s are for meetings you have with others. Assign it to this category so you remember to follow up. Don’t leave the email unmarked in your inbox. If you sent an email or left a voicemail and you’re waiting for a reply. The Waiting for Reply category is for things you don’t want to forget to follow up on. Bills you need to pay also belong in this category, unless you’re not going to pay them right away. You don’t want to keep people waiting, so this category is for phone calls and emails that you need to send ASAP. This category is for all of the actions that help you grow as a person. This category will help you think strategically and keep you from getting distracted by unimportant urgent tasks.
The Purpose and Goals category is the most important category and it is reserved for the most important actions. Here is a versatile category structure that works for a variety of workflows. That way, as we start to work through our tasks, we can follow the order we set when we created our categories. When we create categories, we’re going to number them so they arrange themselves in order of priority. Since we’re going to use categories for actionable emails we need to create different categories for different kinds of actions. To modify your categories or add more colors to Outlook Categories, go to All Categories. If you’ve never used categories before, then the defaults will be named after different colors. To add a category to an email, select an email, right-click and go to categorize. In order to group emails that need similar action together, we’re going to use categories. It’s more efficient than multitasking and switching back and forth between different kinds of tasks. Batching refers to the process of grouping similar tasks together. This prevents us from taking advantage of one an important productivity strategy, batching. The downside is that your inbox doesn’t allow you to prioritize and organize your tasks as well as other tools. Your email inbox works the same way, it’s supposed to be for receiving, yet a lot of people keep emails in their inbox to remind them to do something. Here’s why: you don’t keep your to-do list and your filing cabinet in your mailbox right? Your mailbox is for receiving, your filing cabinet is for storing important papers for later and your to-do list is for getting things done. But why would we want to do that? Why not just flag emails and use that as a to-do list? We need a different approach to organize emails that need us to take action. In the last article, we created a folder structure to organize the emails we need to keep for future reference.
How to categorize emails in outlook 2013 how to#
In this article, you’ll learn how to use color categories in Outlook to organize your to-do list and actionable emails.