Work from home seemed like a future thing 6 months ago but now it seems like we are living the future. With more and more communication between teams happening over emails, how can we keep our Outlook Inbox from flooding with a lot of emails.
In this post, we examine some of the causes of the flood of emails, and two possible solutions.
The Newsletters
You may notice that there are a lot more emails arriving to your Outlook Inbox folder. More and more non-work-related emails such as newsletters are also mixed with your normal work-related emails.
Due to this you may have to keep filing (or deleting) these emails out your Inbox so that this folder contains emails which you can work on as your task list for the day. You still like reading some of those newsletters but your work emails are important.
The time spent filing and clearing the Inbox folder can become annoying after a while.
The Flood
In the age of social distancing, a thin line may exist between professional and personal life. If you are a parent then your work from home just got a bit harder. You may have to help your kids with their school work while dealing with your client at the same time. Your time becomes really precious.
Let’s say one moment you have to deal with all your Inbox emails and it’s a must do task. You tell your kids that you will be done in the next 5 minutes and that you can take a 20 minutes break to help them out with their school work. However, all of a sudden you see your Outlook Inbox folder and it says that you have 13 unread emails.
Now if you reply and file these emails to the correct client folders it might take time.
What do we do. We reply to these emails obviously but we do not have the time to file them. We tell ourselves that we will file these emails later but this never eventuates.
The Search
A few days later your supervisor wanted an update to 2 of the emails to which you replied. You naturally look for these emails in your client folders and guess what, it’s not there. You start panicking but after searching for a while you remembered that you didn’t file these emails.
These emails are still in your Inbox and Sent Items folder. After 30 minutes you finally reply to your supervisor. In a normal case this task would usually take less than 2 minutes to complete.
The Solution
All these problems could have been avoided if you had managed your Outlook Inbox folder properly. This doesn’t have to be difficult!
You can use Outlook Rules or an Outlook Add on called QuickFile to solve these issues.
Outlook rules are good but it can become difficult and complicated if not managed properly.
We suggest you try out QuickFile for Outlook.
With this software you will be able to:
Automatically file your newsletters from your Inbox folder to a dedicated newsletters folder. QuickFile can show you a non-intrusive message whenever emails are moved… and it can also remind you once a day to check your newsletters.. so you don’t miss out on any specials etc.
You can file emails with a click of a button. View our Getting Things Done (GTD), Cleaner Inboxes and Outlook Thread Filing post for more details.
Easily find and move to folders… no more hunting through folder trees to find one folder. Type a few characters from the name of the folder and QuickFile will display a list of matching folders.
And many more advantages such as:
- Filing Outlook Email to Multiple Folders
- Using QuickFile email history to calculate work done during this lock down
- Use QuickFiles eeminders feature to NOT miss important emails while working from home
QuickFile is free
Yes you heard it, QuickFile is free for a 30 day trial for new users free of charge. If for any reason you decide that you do not like the software you can always uninstall this without any cost.
Contact Support
To get help from our expert support team please contact: support@standss.com
If you haven’t tried QuickFile, download a fully functional trial using the link below:
