Effectively organising your emails in Outlook
What will this learning topic cover?
This learning topic is part of the wider Organisation & Management pathway. This topic will introduce you to good practice around the use of Microsoft Outlook. This will enable you to sort, manage and automate parts of your inbox to triage your emails more efficiently.
Please be aware that we will look at both the classic outlook (desktop) and web versions within this topic as the functionality of each version is slightly different.
We have added a quick start guide to this page to help you get started. Please look at the guidance for either classic or web based versions.
Overview:
• Create folders and sort emails into these folders.
• Set up rules for automation.
• Create quick steps and actions.
• Set up and apply conditional formatting.
• Flag, categorise and search your emails.
A way to quickly sort and group emails together based on categories, sender or type.
Learn how to categorise emails to support quicker searching techniques
Effective and effective use of the technology to sort, organise and manage your incoming mail.
How to use this topic page
This topic page is split up into different sections. Each section has a step and an activity to complete. These include scenarios and links off to instructions to try elements for yourself. Each learning unit also has a reflective section to think about how this will be used within your own practice.
Step 1: What is Outlook?
Outlook is a powerful email client and personal information manager that’s part of the Microsoft Office suite. It’s designed to help you manage your emails, schedule, contacts, tasks, and more, all in one place.
What can Outlook help me achieve?
- Email: Manage your inbox efficiently with tools like rules, flags, and a focused inbox.
- Calendar: Schedule and manage appointments, meetings, and events.
- Contacts: Store and organize contact information.
- Tasks: Keep track of your to-do lists and deadlines.
- Notes: Jot down quick notes and reminders.
Step 2: Creating and using folders to organise emails
Why do we need to create folders?
Folders are useful elements within outlook that enable you to sort your emails in to core groups. You can also create sub-folders which enable you to organise within categories.
Folders work as an unique way to help organise and structure your inbox and is designed to help separate key emails for different needs or from key individuals. These can be further separated into sub folders by selecting the folder and right-clicking to create a new folder. Subfolders will enable you to break down the contents of a folder into smaller parts. This can be useful if there are several elements for one project which need to be collated and sorted.
Activity 2: Example and try
Read through the example, this is how Paul uses folders and subfolders to help him organise his own and share inbox.
Paul often receives multiple report emails a day that otherwise are difficult to find and look at throughout the day. This also goes through to a share mailbox for him and his team. He set up a folder for him and his team to help sort the information therefore clearing the backlog. He also decided to add sub-folders to help separate the reports into their different types. This helped everyone organise the data and share the resources between them.
Would this work within your area and how would it help you?
If you would like to try this for your own inbox, please follow the link below and select either classic outlook or web outlook.
Categorising Emails and Meetings
How does categorising help optimise my searches within Microsoft Outlook?
Within Microsoft Outlook you have the ability to categorise or ‘tag’ content with a certain label. This is used to track key messages related to certain topics or from certain individuals/organisations. This will enable you to group interrelated items together within your inbox to make it easier to gather together information.
There are default categories available within the system that are quite useful, however, you can add new categories or edit existing ones to make this work for you.
How can I use this to support my searching?
The search box empowers users to search by more than just keyword. You can use it to search for key actions, dates and in this case categories of content. Once your content has been categorised you will be able to search for that particular category or tag to help you gather relevant information. Doing this regularly can ensure that all materials can be grouped together and save you time with searching.
To search for categorised elements you can do this one of two ways:
- Type the word category and a suggested action will appear saying ‘search with categorized items’ and then choose the category from the list.
- Enter the following into your search bar:
- category:[category name]
Activity 3: Example and try
Read through the example, this is how Paul adapted his use quick actions to help with common daily actions within his inbox.
Paul finds he often loses multiple emails and related correspondence and finds it difficult to locate what he needs. He tried doing this through a folder approach but found that quite a lot of emails overlapped into multiple projects. Instead he decided to use categorisation to help him mark all of his emails that relevant to key tasks or projects. This then allowed him to search by category inside of outlook across all of their folders to locate what they needed.
Would this work within your area and how would you implement this?
If you would like to try this for your own inbox, please follow the link below and select either classic outlook or web outlook.
Step 4: Setting up rules automation within your inbox.
What do we mean by rules automation and why should we use it?
Automation, in terms of outlook, means that the computer will automatically follow a set of rules to run specific actions when that email arrives in your inbox. For example you can set up a rule that when an email with a key phrase or from a specific person comes in, an action can happen.
Most people tend to use rules automation to :
- Move messages to different folders
- Flag/categorise messages messages to look at later
- send automated replies
The reasons that people want to automate the organisation of their inbox is to help sort, manage and efficiently save time with grouping/categorising emails.
Please be aware that all rules, once created will run until you delete or turn it off. It can be useful to think about what you would like to achieve with each rule and how often you need it to run. Rules are most effective when they are triggered several times a day.
Activity 4: Example and try
Read through the example, this is how Paul adapted his use of folders and subfolders with rules to help him organise his own and share inbox.
Paul, in the previous email had already organised folders and sub folders to sort incoming daily reports. Whilst Paul and his team could manually sort the 100 reports into folders. Paul decides to set up a rule which will automatically look at the sender (since each report comes from a set email address) and ask outlook to move each specific report to a specific folder. He also asks it to categorise it and flag it as being unread. This means that all of the reports are sorted, categorised so that they can easily be searched and flagged so they are aware of new messages.
Would this work within your area and how would you implement this?
If you would like to try this for your own inbox, please follow the link below and select either classic outlook or web outlook.
Step 5: Using quick steps to automate processes
What are quick steps?
Quick steps enable you to apply multiple actions at the same time to messages by pressing one button. Some of the common tasks you can accomplish at the same time for example are:
- Moving emails
- Flagging emails
- Categorising emails
- Mark as read/unread
- Create a task
Quick steps will enable you to chain multiple of these actions together to make a unique process. This is really useful if you have repetitive sorting tasks that you have to do within outlook. The example on the left shows how this might be useful and provides you with guidance to adding this within Microsoft Outlook.
Activity 5: Example and try
Read through the example, this is how Paul adapted his use quick actions to help with common daily actions within his inbox.
Paul, in his role as an academic advisor at a university, struggled with managing the high volume of student emails. To streamline his workflow, he utilized Outlook’s Quick Steps feature. By creating a Quick Step to automatically categorize, flag, and move emails to specific folders, Paul significantly reduced his email processing time. This allowed him to focus more on student consultations and less on administrative tasks.
Would this work within your area and how would you implement this?
If you would like to try this for your own inbox, please follow the link below and select either classic outlook or web outlook.
Step 6: Reflection
What have I learnt from this learning topic?
This step is designed to help you think about what you have learned and how this applies to your own practice and context. Learning activity 5 will ask you some questions to help you with this reflection.
Activity 6: Reflect
Use the following questions to help you think about your own practice.
- How can you use the quick actions or automated rules to enhance your current inbox management approaches?
- What elements from this topic page would you like to embed and how will this help support your approach to work?
- Are there some elements here that could impact wider shared mailboxes that may help support the wider team with elements of their work?
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