How to Manage Email Overwhelm in Outlook

How would you like to arrive at your computer at 8:00 in the morning and have only 5 very important emails in your inbox? This seems far-fetched in today’s world of communication overload, but there are ways to make your day less stressful and more productive by managing your Outlook inbox efficiently. This article will help you get started on the concepts and email behaviors that you and your team can adopt to improve communications in your office. At the end of this article, there are links to technical articles with step-by- step instructions on how to implement these concepts in Outlook.

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A few starting thoughts:
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1. It will take you or your administrative assistant about 30 minutes to set up rules and conditions in Outlook at first. Then, you’ll want to tweak and improve them as you see what works and doesn’t work for you. It can be intimidating to have to figure out all the ins and outs of Outlook, but perceive it as an upfront investment of your time that will return peace of mind and time efficiency in the near future.

2. You will need to train your staff to be sensitive to your new email rules. For example, if you decide to read your CC’d emails only once a day, then your team deserves to know that you don’t consider a CC’d message as urgent. Create your email rules, then inform your staff of them so they can act accordingly.

Email Standards in an Organization

I encourage my clients to set a few organizational boundaries on email usage in their organizations.

1. Discourage “Reply all” activity. Reply All messages are junk mail and a nuisance 99% of the time. Some companies go so far as to disable the Reply All button in Outlook. Tell your people that this practice is a waste of time. I often ask people to respond directly to me instead of Reply All. No more Reply All messages!

2. Set ”open for business” hours for non-emergency emails, texts and phone calls. For example, business hours might be 8:00 am to 6:00 pm Monday through Friday, and nothing but emergencies on the weekend. If you are working late and want to send a non-emergency email after hours to get if off your mind, delay delivery until 8:00 am. In this way, you train your staff to take much needed breaks from being “on” all the time, so they can be 100% productive during business hours.

3. Of course, emergencies are a different story. Decide and communicate how emergencies will be responded to.

4. Set up practices in your organization that help recipients know what emails demand their attention. This helps your teammates to be more thoughtful in their use of email and will pay benefits in the form of higher efficiency for all. The US military uses a practice in their email communications that I’ve seen corporate groups use similarly to good use. You establish a practice of using the following keywords at the beginning of the Subject line such as:

    a. INFO: {subject description} This is an update or general communication that needs no
action. As a recipient of INFO messages, you might create a sub-folder call INFO and send all such messages to that box, to be read once a day.

    b. REQUEST: {subject description} This is a messages that seeks approval. For example, you may need your boss to approve your expense report or a requisition for a new hire. These emails should stay in your inbox for processing.

    c. ACTION: {subject description} The sender is strongly asking the receiver to take action.
In the military, action is required with this keyword. These messages stay in the
recipient’s inbox.

Using Rules

Rules will allow you to direct unimportant emails to sub-folders, where you can view them once a day, once a week or never! It’s a powerful way to keep only the most important emails in your inbox and redirect all the non-essential communications to a holding folder. Here’s a good place to start in understanding rules.

How to send CC’d emails to a sub-folder

Too many organizations use the CC: line as a CYA tactic. It’s annoying and often a waste of time. Send all messages that you are CC’d or BCC’d on to a folder aptly called CC/BCC. Check this folder once a day or once a week. Be sure to tell your team that you don’t immediately handle messages you are CC’d on.
Here’s how.

Color coding:

By color coding your emails, you can make important messages visually stand out. For example, you can make all messages from your boss appear in your inbox in red and from your management team in purple. Here’s how.