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« Last post by superboyac on September 08, 2008, 05:47 PM »
OK, I use the Bat at home which has much cooler rules, filters, and coloring features, but now at work I am using Outlook 2007. So here is my method, based on the GTD philosophy.
GTD is all about being fast, efficient and productive. With email, especially at work where I get a lot of email, it is not really productive to be moving things around in a lot of folders and categories, etc. For myself, even for different projects, I'm not going to bother making several different folders for the different projects. I really don't need to have all the specific project emails have their own folder, because organizing that is a pain in the ass and there's no good rule system to do it automatically, because often there is no particular data in an email/task that distinguishes it from one project or another. So I'm not going be moving things around manually...no way.
So, everything comes into my Inbox and that's where all the action takes place. I've set of some GTD search folders. I use search folders because they are not actual folders, just filtered views. This way, all the mail stays in the Inbox but I can use the search folders to look at only what I want (like Virtual Folders in the Bat). The GTD search folders are:
--Do
--Respond
--Delegate
--Defer
--Archive
--Done Items
As soon as I get emails, I will look at it and immediately categorize it (using keyboard shortcuts of course). Once they are categorized, they will automatically be detected by the search folders above. So, the only items that will require effort on my part are those in the Do, Respond, and Delegate folders. I go into those folders to see this list of mails. As I finish each email, I check it off as "Done" and it automatically gets removed from those folders and into the Done Items folder. That's pretty much it. It's quick, efficient, and sophisticated.
As an additional level of prettiness, I take advantage of Automatic Formatting in Outlook 2007 (the one in the Bat is WAY better). With this, if I look in my Inbox with the all the emails in all categories all mixed together, then this automatic formatting gives me a nice visual way to see things. So, the items in the specific GTD categories are colored according to their category color. I also have appointments/tasks/meetings italicized to distinguish them from emails.
So, that's basically it. It's nice I think. I like being efficient.
(what happened to that one post about Groupwise?? I was looking for it)
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