Wendy Wallbridge
This blog is dedicated to Sean who last night declared that his inbox was EMPTY. Coincidentally, this is also written by him so it’s a good thing he practices what he preaches 😉
Keep as few items in your INBOX as possible
At the end of the day, you really shouldn’t have anything in your Outlook Inbox and here is why:
Stress: Emails in your inbox mean something is left undone. Every email should have one of the following five actions, thus meaning it shouldn’t be in your inbox at the end of the day…
- Discard the email (delete it, the info isn’t useful so get rid of it)
- Delegate the email (task it to someone, now … not tomorrow)
- Take immediate action (if it will take 5 minutes or less to resolve, do it now)
- Put in a reference folder (don’t leave it in the inbox *see performance below*). Put it in a ‘non-default’ folder
- File it for follow-up (drag into tasks or your calendar and create a ‘task or appointment’ from it – see Tip #2), if the action item requires follow-up
Performance: Outlook will run slower if it has a massive Inbox – it takes longer to produce views, Antivirus programs will expect to scan it on every open, etc. and your OST files will be big (for caching) thus correcting corruption would take longer too. By Inbox, I mean the ‘actual’ inbox. You can safely create subfolders underneath it, beside it, etc. But it is ideal to keep the ‘actual inbox’ folder, tidy.
Microsoft Says So Too… http://support.microsoft.com/kb/905803
Stay tuned for more tips!