Like many organizations today, we at Comsense use email quite heavily.  Although we do not provide customer support for products like Outlook, we do use them internally.  I thought it would be useful to let you in on some of the techniques I use to keep my 1000+ email messages per day organized. 

Using colors – I have created an organizational rule that identifies all mail from fellow employees by making the color of the message green.  Mail from friends and family is blue. This makes weeding through the hundreds of spam messages I get every day a little easier.

Using Search Folders – Search folders are something new in Outlook 2003.  They are basically like creating a filtered view or performing a search through your information, yet you don’t have to reenter the search criteria every time.  I use a built in search folder called Unread mail, which only shows unread items from my inbox.  It is not a copy of my inbox, but a filtered view of the data from the inbox that meets the criterion of being unread.  For this folder I have the preview pane turned off so I don’t view any mail by accident.  I use this folder in the morning to weed through junk mail.  Search folders can be created to search or filter based on almost anything.  There are a number of predefined ones that you can use as well.

Stop marking items as read automatically – Another thing that I have done is to stop Outlook from automatically marking my items as read.  In the morning I scan through my new messages and delete spam.  But that doesn’t mean I’ve really read my valid email.  I want the items still appearing as unread so that I know I intended to read the item in more detail at a later time.  Once I have actually read the item I manually mark the item as read.  In fact I have added the Mark as Read command to my toolbar to make this easier.  To customize your toolbar simply right click anywhere on your toolbar and click customize.  You can then choose any command and add it to your toolbar.  The nice thing that happens by having my items unread is that they still appear in my Unread Items search folder.  This search folder is now the only place I need to go to know what items I intended to read again.

Flagging Items – We use email quite heavily, and it’s hard to keep track of mail that was just a message versus mail that requires you to perform an action of some kind.  The way to organize this is by using flags in combination with a search folder.  Outlook 2003 introduced multiple flag colors, which is a really cool feature.  I use flags to identify items that require me to do something.  So as I’m reading through my unread items I can mark the item as read, because I have in fact read the item, but I don’t want to forget about it because I’m supposed to do something with it.  So I flag the item red, orange, or green to indicate priority of the action required.  I then use a search folder called For Follow Up that shows only items that have a flag on them.  This folder is further arranged by flag so that the items are grouped together based on flag color.  Now I have a consistent place to go looking for things that need my attention, they don’t get forgotten or buried under a few days worth of messages.  When I have completed the necessary follow-up I simply mark the item Complete which essentially removes the flag and removes the item from my For Follow Up folder.  To make flagging easier I have added the red, orange and green flags to my toolbar in addition to the flag complete button.

I hope that you can take these tips and apply them in your own way to help you organize your email.

Never has our catalog department been so busy. Just when we think there is a light at the end of the tunnel there seems to be another rash of price increases or changes to address. Of course the second round of price changes this year, as a result of the significant steel price increases, had put severe pressure on our catalog department but we still managed to release updates on a very timely basis.  This has also prompted a number of software enhancements to accomodate the surcharges for doors and frames.