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| posted at 11:27:16 By Flipping Heck! | Posted In GTD/Productivity |
I've recently been upgraded to Outlook 2003 and as a result have been playing about with it a bit. To be honest I'm a bit disappointed with the lack of new features in it, I would have though task handling would have been improved and that they could have incorporated a few project management features into it. Anyway, enough of the rant, here's my take on filtering mail in a GTD-esq manner for Outlook 2003.
This method uses the in-built coloured flags in Outlook 2003 to filter messages into different folders (contexts). The reason we are using coloured flags is that they can be applied both automatically when the message hits your inbox and also from right clicking on the flag icon on any message. This allows the filter flag to be applied quite easily.
The following example can be applied to any type of message you wish, for the purposes of this tutorial I have chosen an "Order Email".
Basically you only want to see new orders that have arrived but you want to be able to keep a record of all order emails for future reference. You don't want to have to wade through hundreds of emails to find those that you haven't processed so we set up a "Search Folder" to show only the emails that are relevant to us.
Here's the workflow:
Firstly we create a folder to hold the order emails:
Secondly we set up a rule to mark the email with a flag and move it. To set up a rule:
Selecting the Conditions of the rule:
For the purposes of this we'll assume that the email subject line is "My Website Order" but you can use To Address, from address etc. To set the move rule up:
All messages in the Inbox with the words "My Website Order" will now have been flagged with the selected flag and moved to the selected folder.
At this point move to the "Received Orders" folder and unflag (Right Click > Clear Flag) any processed orders so that they don't appear in our search folder later on.
Creating the Search Folder
We're going to use the Search Folder to pull in only those orders that haven't been processed from the Received Orders folder. To to this:
The search folder is now Added and highlighted for you in the "All Mail Folders > Search Folders"
To stop you having to browse to the "Search Folders" section each time (and as it's right at the bottom of the list it's easy to forget about), right click on the "Orders To Process" folder and select "Add To Favorites". This Add the folder to your favourites folder.
If you click on the "Mail" tab and the "Favourite Folders" pane isn't visible, Click on the "Folder List" icon at the bottom of the navigation pane.
And there you have it, all new orders will be flagged and moved and you can ignore any other order emails until you need to view them.
You can apply this for GTD by having an "@ Waiting for" flag, "@ Email" flag etc. with each context having it's own filter and flag colour.
Update: Please see the Microsoft website for details on how you can name your Flags
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