How to master the Inbox

For many of us, email is ubiquitous. We begin the (work)day at the same place and in very much the same way as we finish it: in our Inbox, checking, reading, answering and deleting messages. These activities regularly stay with us throughout the day.

Suppose you have a collection of 200 messages in your Inbox. Some might need your attention today, some next week, and others just need your attention...sometime. How do you keep track of all this, and how do you call attention to the messages you want to see today?

The easy way to master tasks received on mail: FLAGS

• When you flag your mails, they automatically become tasks.
• Use flags to set your own priorities for how and when to follow up messages.
• You should decide immediately what to do with it
• Use the 4 D's as a guide: Do now - Delegate - Delete - Do later

For most people, a lot of the things to do, follow up on, or delegate to others are initiated by receiving an email. So the Inbox becomes your task management system, and it is made to support you in task management.

Just flag your mails as soon as they arrive. Set for every incoming mail a flag depending on the action you want to do with that email (for example: DO NOW, DO LATER, DELEGATE, JUST READ). And after you flagged them start with the highest priority task.

You can flag messages right from your inbox:

1. The Flag Status column. Rigth click here to had a flag
2. You have six flag colors to choose from. The flags are not labelled, so you decide what significance to assign a particular color. Once a message is flagged, the flag appears in the Flag Status column .
3. Sort messages according to their flags and follow up based on priorities
4. When you have followed up, use the Flag Complete command to change the flag status. Then, when you sort by flag status, you can get the satisfaction of seeing what you've already accomplished.

Base a "To Do" list on flags

To quickly get organized, a great trick is to use flags with Search Folders. If you were to use these two features together, you could create an automatic "To Do" list. That is, as soon as you flagged a message, it would automatically appear in the For Follow Up Search Folder..

Important Tip:  Once you get used to flags, you may want to prioritize certain messages as soon as you read them.

Search Folders appear along with the rest of your mail folders in the Navigation Pane.