Getting things done in your Outlook inbox

If you’ve attended my “Become an Inbox Zero Superhero workshop” and got your email inbox down to zero during the session, you know what a great feeling that makes. That of course is a short term high, and if you go back to your old habits, it’ll only be a matter of time before you have to go through the big exercise again.

 The key is to work from your @ACTION folder not your inbox. If you’ve not been on the workshop, you may have a folder similar to this already, for example “Unactioned”, “To-Do”, “Respond to”.

 The question I get asked a lot is, how am I going to REMEMBER to go into this folder? At first we might not trust ourselves to go in there first to do our work. There’s a simple thing you can tweak in Microsoft Outlook to help you to do that, plus you’ll know the number of things you have to do, and which folder they are in.

1.    Right click on your @ACTION folder (or whatever you have a called it), then click on “Properties” at the bottom of the list.

2.    Click on the checkbox for “Show total number of items”, rather than for “Show number of unread items”.

And voila, you’ll always see how many items you need to take action on. It also adds an extra bit of focus to your day, as your mind will naturally want to tick off these items to reduce the total number of items remaining.

 Test this out to see how it works for you, and let me know the results in the comments.