Ask questions and listen for what is really driving your Exec’s inbox stress, their desired outcome, and their openness to change. Listen before diving into managing your leader’s inboxīefore you dive into your leader’s inbox and start making changes, first pause and listen. 6 Inbox Management Tips from Executive Assistants 1. Keep reading as we share six brilliant tactics EAs at Base use to reset their Exec’s inbox and keep it efficient, clean, and organized for the long run. If you’re constantly trying to achieve inbox zero and not seeing much progress, try leaning in with an inbox reset! With this method, you can get your leader (and yourself!) back on track with a well-managed and stress-free inbox in a matter of days – with minimal upkeep. So, get labeling and watch your mailbox become a completely different-and better-place.No doubt the email inbox can be a source of frustration. Labels have become an intuitive and integral part of the Gmail experience, mostly because you can't add folders. You can also create filters to label emails automatically based on whatever criteria you want. Like in Outlook, you can create as many labels as you want (sort of-there's a limit of 5,000, after which Google says you might experience performance problems, but few people ever do) and assign them colors.

In Gmail, tagging is called 'labeling,' and it works in both the web and mobile apps. Then you get the benefit of tagging and the benefit of a folder view. You can even change your Archive folder view so that it groups mail by categories, which will mimic a folder structure. When categorizing your mail, you can categorize everything in a single folder by selecting all the email (using the Ctrl+A keyboard shortcut), and then selecting your category-or categories-of choice. Categories haven't come to the Outlook mobile app yet, so you'll have to do your categorizing in the client or the web app. Without reading anything, you'll know that every purple email, calendar event, task, note, or contact is associated with that project. For example, if you create a category for a project and give it a specific color-let's say purple-you can tag every related item with that category. This not only makes it easy to search but also highlights your Outlook contents with a color. In Outlook, tagging is called 'categorizing.' You can create as many categories as you want, assign them colors, and then apply them to anything in Outlook-emails, calendar events, tasks, notes, and even contacts. Even if you end up keeping folders, tagging is so useful that we recommend doing it anyway. This way, you can be sure it's easy to find again.īest of all, tagging is simple in (almost) every modern email app. You can tag in bulk, so if you have a folder for a client, you can tag every item in there with the name of that client before moving it into your archive. If you're moving from a folder-based system to a single archive, tagging is the key to being able to find things afterward. You just add the appropriate tags to the email, and then you can easily find it again, whether you want to find emails related to that vendor, client, or so on. With tagging, you no longer have to decide if that mail about a vendor issue on a client project goes in the vendor folder, client folder, project folder, or lessons learned folder. The single biggest benefit of using tags instead of folders is that you're not forced to pigeonhole an email into just one folder. For example, in Gmail, just click the Archive button.īut, if you've got no folders, how do you arrange your messages for easy retrieval? The answer is simple: tagging. Don't waste time moving messages into folders in your email client-put everything in one archive folder. So, people create one extra folder, and then two, and then loads! Use these techniques instead of folders to organize your archive. The problem with keeping email in one large archive is finding specific messages again.

Best way to organise emails in outlook