Question

Every software development professional (and especially project managers) has to deal with a never ending stream of e-mails. What is the best way of organising them in MS Outlook?

Obviously some fancy issue tracking tools give more flexibility but I am interested in plain vanilla approach that can be deployed within most organisations.

P.S. Finding e-mails is generally the least of the problems that needs to be addressed. Search nowdays is pretty good.

Answer 1

Within my main inbox I have 3 sub folers: Do, Done, Defer and 3 macros to move the selected folder into the relevent folder. (alt-1 moves the selected mail to done and then selects the next mail). Each day I quickly filter my inbox into the three folders. I can process several hundred mails in 20 mins or so.

Do, something I expect to process today. Done, something I don’t care about/have read and understood, I dont expect to refer back to these today. Defer, something I will do something about but not today.

At the end of processing I expect my inbox to be empty.

At the end of the day all mail items in Do move to Defer (I dont want to keep things in Done overnight).

At the start of the day all items in Defer are filtered using the rules above, I dont want to leave things in Defer for more then a day or 2. If stuff hangs around for too long I will add it to my diary to process later.

At the end of the day all mail in Done is copied into an archive folder based on the month/year. Done is just a parking place for things to be archived.

I use a tool to index my archive, I actually use X1 but google desktop is an excellent alternative.

I filter out any important facts i would like to refer back to in outlook notes.

I filter out any tasks I would like to recal into omni focus (http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnifocus/) the best GTD I have found.

I DO NOT EVER use my inbox as a todo list or a mechanism for recording subtle facts I want to recall later. I know a lot of people do but IMHO its just a bad way to be.

(cross posted to LJ).

EDIT.

Oh per a post above I also filter any mail not posted to me directly, by the mailing list the mail was sent to. I give different amounts of attention to each mailing list. I do follow the mechanism above for each mailing list but some I glance at and some I process in detail.

ReEDIT

In comments I was asked to provide the source for the macros I mentioned above. I DONT suggest this is seen as an example of good VBA, I am pretty sure it was sourced from the interweb and adapted for my purposes. It has worked reliably for many years.

Sub MoveToDone()     On Error Resume Next      Dim objFolder As Outlook.MAPIFolder, objInbox As Outlook.MAPIFolder     Dim objNS As Outlook.NameSpace, objItem As Outlook.MailItem      Set objNS = Application.GetNamespace('MAPI')     Set objInbox = objNS.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)     Set objFolder = objInbox.Folders('Done')      'Assume this is a mail folder      If objFolder Is Nothing Then         MsgBox 'This folder doesn't exist!', vbOKOnly + vbExclamation, 'INVALID FOLDER'     End If      If Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Count = 0 Then         'Require that this procedure be called only when a message is selected         MsgBox 'No msgs selected', vbOKOnly + vbExclamation, 'NO_MSG_SELECTED'         Exit Sub     End If      For Each objItem In Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection         If objFolder.DefaultItemType = olMailItem Then             If objItem.Class = olMail Then                 objItem.Move objFolder             End If         End If     Next       Set objItem = Nothing     Set objFolder = Nothing     Set objInbox = Nothing     Set objNS = Nothing  End Sub