Then put the power of mail folders and rules to work. You're not ready to part with these email messages, but you don't need them in your inbox either. Pick the five largest sources of email in your inbox that you check out or refer to sometimes but that you don't read regularly. The comprehensive email package has a powerful set of email rules, or filters, that can help automate the process of making your inbox manageable. You don't need to be a nerd to use Outlook's mail rules. To turn Focused Inbox off, click the View tab on the Ribbon and then click the Show Focused Inbox button to toggle it off. My email accounts are all IMAP, and Focused Inbox doesn't seem to work with IMAP accounts unless they're Microsoft accounts: and accounts essentially connect to Outlook 2016 as if they were Exchange, and so they employ the feature. But what we're about to create goes way beyond its capabilities.įocused Inbox may or may not be turned on by default in your version of Outlook, and if you aren’t an Office 365 subscriber, you won’t have it at all. And if you train it, it works pretty well. It attempts to automatically separate the wheat from the chaff for you. The next step is to turn off Outlook 2016's Focused Inbox. Do unsubscribe from any legitimate company that you just don't have time for and likely never will.
Don't unsubscribe from spam that may get you more mail. I'm guessing that most of it is mailings from companies or websites that you're somewhat interested in but have little time to read: content, social media notifications, newsletters, mailing lists, forums, blogs, news, webcasts, white papers, press releases and so on.Īsk yourself: Do I really need all this? And then spend an hour unsubscribing from the mailing lists of companies and groups that send you the most email that you rarely if ever check. We'll deal with that later.Ĭonsider the balance, some 40% of your email that you never look at or care much about. Not quite half of that is going to be spam and untargeted mailings that hold no interest. What percent of your email is important? 20%? Maybe 30%? Let's be optimistic and say that 70% your email is not required reading. That way you can spend more time focusing on the email that you need to read and reply to. The most expedient way to streamline your inbox is by cutting back on the legitimate mail you receive that you don't read. There's no right answer, and both methods are fully compatible with the strategies presented here. The downside is that your inbox is that historical record. The second method is a little faster, and you get an historical record of all your email. Instead of trying to clear the inbox of messages, these users are trying to clear it of unread marks. This second technique relies on unread marks. Their goal is to make their inbox empty by assessing or reading email and deleting as they go.Ī smaller group doesn't bother to delete the messages they've already read or skipped. One way of handling it, known as Inbox Zero, nearly approaches a religion for some people. There are two basic strategies for managing your inbox. But if you take that knowledge and leverage Outlook's complexity and power to your advantage, you can boost your inbox management productivity significantly. Only you know what mail is important to you. No algorithm or set of built-in rules from Microsoft is going to solve the inbox overload problem that many business users face. For some users, self-discipline may be the thing that's most needed. Whatever you call it, this functionality is a step in the right direction, but it falls well short of what most users really need. (Microsoft shrewdly implemented Focused Inbox as a view instead of as a mailbox. The difference between them is more marketing than programming. This is little more than Clutter inverted so that it highlights mail you want to see instead of mail you probably don't want to see. More recently, Microsoft rolled out a feature called the Focused Inbox. Clutter was not well received because users were not given a way to fully remove it. It started by introducing to Office 365 subscribers a feature called Clutter, an automated filtering tool that put emails you were unlikely to open (based on your past behavior) into a separate folder. To be fair, Microsoft has been trying to address the overwhelmed-inbox condition for the last couple of years. This article focuses on making inbox management much more productive. I've decided to tackle Outlook's annoyances head on. When I think about why I hate the software, it comes down to a set of frustrations around key areas like a lack of focus on inbox management, a tacked-on search facility with a terrible user interface, and the absence of two-way syncing with non-Microsoft sources of calendars and contacts.
#CREATE A RULE IN OUTLOOK 2016 FOR MAC WINDOWS#
But in the Windows environment, there's no better email, calendaring and contacts package than Microsoft Outlook 2016.
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