Manage your outlook mailbox efficiently

Work life balance has been challenging during the pandemic. It’s been even more challenging attempting to balance the need to be productive, organized, and efficient at work, while being drowned by numerous amounts of action items and emails in your inbox.

Managing and Prioritizing emails in your inbox alone can be categorized as a full-time job since we always have to play catch up. I always dreaded the sound of the outlook mail arriving in my inbox until I took the courage to research for ways to better manage, prioritize my emails and help me stay on top of it.

According to Business Productivity, here’s a summary of the simple steps I implemented to help me prioritize and manage my emails. Assuming you are using the Microsoft Outlook email client, you will want to do the following:

1. Eliminate the multiple folder tree structure

2. Crete three simple folders – Action, Read Later & Archive.

3. The Action folder is categorized into three categories – Action Urgently, Action (at some point in time), Action (to follow up on but waiting for feedback) and Scheduled (email with a scheduled time to follow up on).

4. The Read folder contains emails that you’ll like to read later but do not need to be actioned.

5. The Archive folder contains emails that have been treated but can be referred to later.

6. Respond immediately to an email that takes less than two minutes to action.

7. Make use of “Quick Steps” to create categories within the Action folder.

You can view the detailed YouTube video here. It takes about 11 (eleven) minutes to familiarize yourself with the steps taken to implement this email management technique.