Each email in your inbox has a grayed out flag next to it. A flagged email will appear in your Outlook To-Do Bar, your Tasks, and in the Daily Task List in the calendar, ensuring that it won’t get overlooked.įlagging an email is easy. When you receive one of these important emails but don’t have the time to respond in the moment, a flag can help keep the message top of mind by increasing its visibility in your inbox. Important emails, even with the use of folders and categories, can still slip through the cracks and get lost in the deluge. We’ve all experienced forgetting to reply to an important email because the flood of daily emails is simply too much to keep up with. When this folder is no longer top priority, simply right click again and choose “Remove from Favorites.”įlag important emails for yourself and recipients To do this, right click the desired folder and choose “Show in Favorites.” This will keep the folder at the top of your Outlook Navigation Pane for easy access. If you don’t want to lose track of important messages, “favorite” those folders that you want to stay top of mind and at the top of your to-do list. Now back in your inbox, select an email, click on the Categories button, and choose the relevant category You can either select one of the existing color categories and rename, or create a new categoryĤ. The categories are by default named after their color. Click on the inbox tab and select Categorizeģ. To create a category, follow these steps:ġ. Click OK to create or drag into an existing folder to create a subfolderĬategories allow you to further organize your emails through color-coding to flag messages as urgent, low-priority, personal, etc. To create additional, more specific folders, follow these simple instructions:Ĥ. Outlook provides some default folders including Drafts, Sent Mail, Spam, Trash, and Deleted Items. Folders are similar to the folders you might use on your computer to organize files into helpful groups. As you’ll see in our final tip, however, embracing the clutter may be the most efficient solution.īefore you can organize your Outlook inbox, it’s important to know the distinction between folders and categories.

These tips may take some time up-front, but then should hopefully save you time in the future. Add that staggering statistic to the fact that both physical clutter and digital hoarding can have a significant impact on mental health, and the argument for organizing your inbox - to an extent - becomes pretty clear.īelow we share several ways to quickly tidy up your inbox in Outlook. We get so many emails that, according to McKinsey, we spend 28 percent of a normal workday, or 2.6 hours, reading and answering emails. With the constant, steady stream of new messages flooding our inbox on a daily, even hourly, basis, it’s no wonder some fall through the cracks. The “out of sight, out of mind” problem plagues most of us when it comes to managing our email.

How many times has an important email gone unanswered because it slipped to the second or third page of your inbox? If your answer is something along the lines of, “So many times I’ve lost count,” you’re far from alone.

No unreplied email in my inbox