In our earlier article about performing an e-mail audit I promised to demonstrate how to use Outlook’s rules to automatically move your Like to Have messages to specific folders. Outlook gives you two ways to create rules. One is very robust but rather complex. The other is quick, simple and applies to most users’ needs.
Watch this Outlook Time Saver to learn the quick way to create a rules.
If you find yourself deleting a large number of e-mails each day, it is a good idea to take a few minutes to do a quick E-mail Audit to assess the sources. Armed with this information you can take action to reduce your e-mail bloat so that you can focus more time and energy on the things that are important to you.
Here’s a quick video about how to do it:
Here are the steps:
Sort your inbox by the From (sender) column. In most e-mail clients just click From in the column header.
Look at each sender and decide if their messages fall into only one of these four broad. Be very honest with yourself about whether or not you really need these messages.
Add the total of each category. Then divide the total of each category into the total of all messages to determine the percentage. sound like too much work? No problem I created a simple E-mail Audit Worksheet to help you tabulate the results. Just right-click the link and choose “Save Link as” or Save File As” to download. There’s also a PDF version at the bottom of the page if you prefer to do this on paper.
Take Action
Take the following actions for each category.
It may look like a lot of work, but it doesn’t take long. And the benefit of less wasted time and energy more than justify the time investment.
Keeping your message flow reduced is a journey not a destination. Schedule time each month to do an e-mail audit to keep your unwanted messages to a minimum.
