How to Keep Your Inbox Organized

It is smart to use Microsoft Outlook as a large tool for organizing your email and time. This article is part of a series of articles that will teach you how to use Outlook’s many helpful functions. This will help immensely as you start organizing your Microsoft Outlook.


Maybe you’ve been using Outlook for awhile now but you haven’t been taking advantages of any of the helpful functions. Have you realized it is time to start organizing your Microsoft Outlook? Is your inbox overflowing? Then it’s time to get started. And the best place to start is an empty inbox.


Start by doing a quick clean up of your inbox, here is how. First create a folder for old emails. Right click on the inbox, and select new folder. Type Old Emails in the name field and click ok. Now move any email in your inbox that is two weeks old or more. This isn’t the end of the road for this email, you still have to sort it. Schedule a small chunk of time everyday to sort through your folder of old emails until you’ve emptied it. This means you’ve acted on, filed, or deleted all of your old emails. Shift +delete will permanently delete any emails you’ve selected. You can keep emails you have deleted for a week to two weeks before you permanently remove them.


Your email is not a system designed for filing. You may have left an email in your inbox because you needed the attachment connected to it. When you receive an email with an attachment you should save it outside of your email right away. You can save this email attachment using one of two methods. You could either open the email, click on “save attachment” in the file menu, or you could right click on the attachment and then select “save as”. When you save your attachment give it a name that will remind you what the content of it is. It is a waste of your time to have to open up multiple attachments searching for what you need because of unclear file names. When you are organizing Microsoft Outlook it is important to save the files you need outside of your email service so that you can effectively empty your inbox.


If it feels like an entire email should be saved and filed you can do that in a couple ways. The first is you can save it as a word document. In order to do this you are literally going to copy and paste from an email into a document. Or if you prefer you can go through a different process to save the email in my documents. First select the email you want. Then select “file”, followed by “save as”. Search for “my documents”, or a different location in your computer if you want. Enter in the file name you have chosen that will clearly identify your email message. In the “save as” type field click on the down arrow and choose Outlook Message Format (*.msg), and then save. You’ll notice the icon next to your file in my documents will show you have saved an email.


Organizing Microsoft Outlook starts with your empty inbox. Keep in mind your inbox should not be used as a filing system! Act on your email, save them, or delete in order to stop this problem from happening again. Want to make it easier on yourself? Use the Rules Wizard. You’ll never have to dig out your inbox again since you will have presorted your emails into the appropriate folders. Get started by clearing out your inbox and setting up a daily appointment to deal with the backlog. And then keep your commitment to yourself!