If you are like millions of other corporate white color workers out there, you are using Microsoft Outlook to handle email and calendar. The first thing you start and the last thing you shut down every day is Outlook. And, if you are anything like everyone else - hint: you are!!! - then your inbox is a disaster. When you come back from vacation, it is an even bigger disaster.

How can you clear out your inbox and keep it clear?

This is the first in a series of articles with suggestions on how you can manage the piles of email that come your way. I get about 300 email messages a day and send around 120 per day. Almost every night when I go home, my inbox is dead empty. When I come back from vacation, it only takes about 2 hours for me to get caught up again.

How do I do it? I follow several really easy principles that keep things simple and help me decide what is junk and what is not.

Create Personal Folders

You are filing your email away, right? Did you know that when you start up Outlook, the email that is in your inbox is not stored on your computer? It is actually stored on a remote server that the IT guys manage, and Outlook is pulling down a list of email stored there and showing it to you.

Perhaps you are familiar with the concept of Email Jail. When you have more messages stored on the Email Server than are allowed, you will get a nasty gram in your inbox that will tell you that your inbox is full, and that you must clear out some messages. Until you do, you are not allowed to send any more email. If you let your inbox fill up even more, you will not be allowed to receive any new messages.

Stay out of email jail by creating personal folders and filing away your email. Creating personal folders should be done with minimal choice and organization required. Your email is searchable - don’t muck things up by creating individual folders for every project or concept within your company so you can find things manually. That will only slow down your filing and prevent you from searching using the automated search function in Outlook.

Create folders like this:

Active
Archive 2006
Archive 2007
Archive 2008

That’s it. Now, drag all messages from your sent items and your inbox into the appropriate archive folder for that year. Whatever year the message came during, put it in that folder.

Save Worthy?

The Active folder is where you drag any message from your inbox that seems save-worthy.

Messages are save-worthy if:

• They are the last message in a conversation and contain all of the previous messages. Don’t save the earlier ones. Trash them.
• They contain information in them that you think you might need to reference later on. I delete all personal messages.
• The contents do not expire. I delete messages that give a URL in them that I have saved as a favorite in Internet Explorer or Firefox. I delete all issues that are resolved.
• The message is directly relevant to your work. I delete other people’s random status reports after I read them. I am not trying to archive all comm traffic.
• I have replied to the message and no longer need it.

I put messages into the Active folder and leave them there for 30 days. Every 1st of the month, I backup my documents and such, and I also open up the Active folder and copy everything more than 30 days old to the Archive folder for the appropriate year (right now - 2008).

No Sub Folders

I don’t make subfolders of my archives. I don’t try to group messages into folders. I just archive them by year so that the .pst files (Post Office Files that Outlook uses to store your personal folders in) don’t get too large.

Making subfolders makes searching a real pain the butt.

I also don’t use categories. Adding categories slows me down as well. I have another trick for that.

Edit the Subject

I am careful to edit the subject line of email to help me find it later. Here are some good principles:

• Before I send out a message, I put the project name and ID number in the message with a good subject. Using thoughtless subjects like “Dude” result in chaos later
• I rename subjects on emails I receive before I reply to improve searchability on them.
• When an email is particularly save-worthy, I definitely give it an excellent subject before I file it away in my Active folder.

That’s your first installment of help using Outlook. Create personal folders, keep them very simple, file only the last message in a thread, delete everything that is not save-worthy, edit subjects, and never make folders for groups of messages.

Next time: The Two Minute Rule!