Manage your Inbox like a PRO

With an average of 400 emails per week, Outlook plays a key part of my work week.

As such, in this article I have compiled some of the strategies I use to be as efficient as possible when managing my inbox, calendar and to-do list so that I can balance email management without feeling drained or consumed by the constant flow of memos.

First thing you want to do is stop Outlook from interrupting your productive work by continuously pushing notifications into the corner of your screen which is both distracting and annoying. To disable notifications all you need to do is navigate to your Outlook options > Mail and then uncheck the "Display a Desktop Alert" checkbox.

Now that you regained control you need to decide how often you want to check your Inbox and what are the best time slots to do so. For me I made that decision based on a couple of metrics which I checked after a month's use (see image below).

Based on the chart above I noticed that the periods where I receive the highest number of emails are between 10 AM and noon and just after lunch around 2 PM. This aligns great with my focus period which is early morning, meaning that I have set myself the goal to check my inbox middle morning for 15 minutes, just before lunch time, middle afternoon and close of business play (meaning about 1 hour per day dedicated to emails).

Now that we have a plan it's time to learn how to deal with our inbox. Whilst there are several strategies out there, main two being Getting Things Done and Pomodoro I am not a big fan of archiving emails immediately without at least checking their subjects as GTD suggests. This means that I had to find another way to quickly archive emails on my inbox to the right folder in the shortest time possible otherwise my inbox would quickly turn into hell. Fortunately for me, I found this wonderful Outlook plugin called SimplyFile.

SimplFile uses a learning algorithm to make recommendations on which folders to store newly received messages. With 273 folders currently on my left-side menu SimplyFile is undoubtedly a life saver and something I no longer know how to work without.

Whenever I receive a new email, SimplyFile suggests the top 3 most likely destination folders to store it which together with the use of hotkeys allows me to be literally 1 keystroke away from taking care of each message and carry on skimming (example below).

I have been a huge fan of Inbox 0 since the start of my career and, as you will probably know already, that means that by the end of a working day you should have less than 5 emails sitting in your inbox, ideally 0. For me, my inbox looked like this at 6 PM today:

To get to this point I make use of the following inbox management technique:

• Is the email relevant at all? If not, delete!*
• Does the email require an action? If not, acknowledge content, archive and move on
• If requires action, does it take less than 5 min to reply? If so, reply immediately
• If not, can this email be taken care of by someone else in my team? If so, forward
• If it requires you to work on it create a task** from it and put a placeholder in the calendar with estimated duration to complete it (calendar placeholders to work on emails or your tasks are a great way for you to set time for yourself to progress with your to-do list without being pulled to meetings all the time)

*Thanks to Konrads for his comment on this one, Delete was indeed a great discovery and though it seemed super weird for me at the beginning I find myself being able to delete more and more emails ruthlessly.

**You can automate this using Quick Actions on Outlook. I use a quick action button at the top "Work on this!" to move an inbox message to my calendar.

OK, we have now hopefully got rid of most (if not all) items in our inbox. Time to get cracking with more interesting stuff. For that let's take a look at what my week looks like.

You will notice two key things: colour coding and that there is no meeting overlap. Why? Because I don't have the power of ubiquity (yet!) and therefore can't accept two meetings at the same time. How about events that you can't attend but still want to keep track on your calendar? For those I change their time so that they start after the ones I do need to attend (naturally better to keep the time right for sessions I will be joining). There, problem solved.

In regards to colour coding, a lot of people like to use categories such as Training, Internal Meetings, Customer Facing, To-Do, and so on. Whilst I do use such categories I try to use colour ranges as a means to understand how much prep I need to do for each meeting.

This means that a quick look at my calendar above quickly tells me that those darker morning calls are the critical ones I have to attend and prep for (senior leadership updates) with another important call on Monday evening for which some pre-work is required.

Last but definitely not least, lunch breaks. Half an hour every day and if not possible one hour in the afternoon so that I can get a bit of rest and eat before getting back to work.

With the inbox and calendar ready to go it's time to look at Task Management. Tasks are a great way to set reminders to follow up with clients or your team so that you don't have to clutter your mind you what needs chasing. For every important action I require from someone else (internal or external) I create a task with a reminder. This means that I use calendar placeholders for my tasks and to-do items for everyone else's tasks.

Instead of flagging items in my Inbox I flag them on the Sent Items folder and set a reminder for when I want to follow-up (typically 3-5 days after). The little flag icon is not obvious on the Sent Items but will reveal itself if you hover through the list.

And that's it folks, these are some of the strategies I use to tame my Inbox. Hope it gives you some ideas on how to save time spent with emails and focus on more valuable activities.