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.

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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.

  • Necessary -The messages you need to do your job or live your life.
  • Like to Have (information that you may need one day and would like to have access when it’s time.  These are messages you typically move to another folder (that you rarely visit) or you allow to pile up in your inbox),
  • Unnecessary – Routine messages that come from social networking sites, newsletters (not this one of course) and solicitations form those nice people who sent you the free eBooks.  You either delete these or let them accumulate in your inbox “just in case.”
  • Spam – Enough said (but you may want to ask your significant other if they added you to the special enhancement distribution list)

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.

  1. Necessary messages require your attention so leave them alone (until it’s time to process your mail).
  2. Like to Have – Create rules to automatically move them to a folder so that you don’t have to make decisions about them each day when process your e-mail.  I’ll post a short video about how to use Outlook’s quick rules later this week.
  3. Unnecessary – Every e-mail from a reputable sender includes an opt-out (remove from list) link. Click it and follow the instructions to remove your name (not our list please). If the messages are from social networking sites you can change the global settings in your account to turn these off. By default most of these sites send you notifications about everything. Unless you have lots of time on your hands then
  4. Spam – Add them to the Junk Mail folder in your e-mail client or better yet nuke them in spam filter.

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.

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