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Clear Your E-Mail Clutter On the Road
Power Trip · May 8, 2004

The e-mail messages land in my inbox, one after the other, with the relentlessness of a tropical rainstorm. Most of the e-mails are junk, and with subjects like "A humour game" and "Re: Hi," they drain straight into my spam filters. It's an unusually heavy morning. Since I started writing this column about 15 minutes ago, I've counted 116 new messages, and not one of them is legitimate.

Managing e-mail continues to evolve toward a full-time job for many people. A 2003 survey by the research firm Public Opinion Strategies found that more than half of all businesses rely on filters or "whitelists" to keep their employees organized while they're in the office.

But what happens when you're out of the office?

It's easy to get into deep water while you're on the road, at an off-site meeting, or (especially) on vacation. For example, although my laptop computer has a sophisticated e-mail filter, I don't always have time to update it, which allows many messages to reach me that would otherwise get zapped. The settings on Microsoft Outlook 2003 are also different on my laptop than on my desktop, and again, I don't always have the time to synch it up before I leave. Staying organized on the road — at least as far as e-mail goes — is no simple task.

Fortunately, a better knowledge of Outlook could take you a long way, even when you're using a different PC. Here are five e-mail housekeeping secrets you might not know about:

Create more than one inbox. Did you know that Outlook allows you to create multiple inboxes, where you can send e-mail based on your rules? It's a vastly underused feature, according to software experts such as Don Cook, the director of marketing for Learn.com, an e-learning company in Sunrise, Fla. "I see tons of users who keep hundreds of e-mail messages in their [primary] inbox just because they don't want to delete them." So how do you create a sub-inbox? Easy. Go to File, then Folder, then New Folder, and then "Create new folder." Select your inbox, make sure the settings are on "Folder contains: mail and post items," and then give the folder a name.

Change your "view" to see less — and more. One little-known way to clear the clutter and see relevant correspondences is to change your view. In Outlook 2003, click on View, followed by "Arrange By" and then "Conversation." That will show you all of the messages relevant to the particular topic — plus it usually reduces the amount of information on the screen, which is great when you're on a laptop or a Tablet PC. "Being able to see conversations together in an easy-to-read 'tree view' also helps you follow conversations from beginning to end," says Aaron Cartwright, a director of technology innovation for FranklinCovey in Salt Lake City.

Click on the "From" line from time to time. This isn't exactly a secret, but I am including this tip anyway. Most people get the e-mails in the order they come in, with the most recent at the top. By hitting the "From" line at the top of your inbox, you can see alphabetically all the messages from senders that you've saved. It's easier to find messages from a particular sender this way. But it's also an easy way to find out you've got a lot of messages you no longer need to keep. When you see a message you are sure has outlived its usefulness, hit "Shift" and the Delete key and it's gone forever. (Be careful on the road in what you highlight to delete, however. I once inadvertently defined and then deleted — forever — the bottom half of my inbox.) Want to go back to your normal view? Click on "Received."

Use rules to keep your primary inbox clear. That's the advice of professional software trainers like James Wong, chief executive officer of Avidian Technologies in Bellevue, Wash. "The key to effectively managing e-mails is to keep your inbox as empty as possible," he says. "For many people, once their e-mail goes above 50 to 100, they start losing count of what is in their inbox and the application starts losing efficiency." How to keep the clutter out? Click on Tools, and go to "Rules and Alerts" to send designated e-mails to another folder, or even to the "Deleted Items" folder, which should prevent your inbox from overflowing.

Tell 'em apart by getting colorful. Your incoming e-mail doesn't have to look like a massive gray blob. Go to Tools, then Organize, and click on "Using Colors." You can color-code important e-mails from clients or just specify that you want messages sent to yourself to look different. "I'm always amazed by the number of people who don't know how to use colors," says Brian Olson, a spokesman for Lakewood, Colo.-based Video Professor, which offers CD-ROM classes on Outlook. "If you're getting more than 100 e-mails a day, it helps you notice priority messages immediately. And in these days of infected e-mail attachments, it also helps you find non-regular traffic." (Tell me about it — I'm up to 545 messages now!)

If you spend a lot of time with Outlook, as I do, these tips may sound familiar. You might know about creating more than one inbox, for example — a lot of small-business owners I know are fairly sophisticated when it comes to sifting through e-mail. But once you've mastered these organization strategies, there are a few more things you should be aware of.

Take advantage of shortcuts. This is especially important on the road, where you might not have a great deal of time to use Outlook. CTRL-Shift-M creates a new e-mail, CTRL-R replies, and CTRL-P prints. And my favorite: CTRL-A to define a whole e-mail, CTRL-C to copy text and CTRL-V to paste text. But the coolest shortcut is definitely ALT-TAB, which lets you toggle between applications. Another shortcut: If you drag an e-mail into your address book, it will automatically create a new entry, along with many of the text-fields already filled in.

Know when not to take shortcuts. Sometimes, clicking on CTRL-R from inside a full mailbox can just lead to more problems (on slower laptops, you might think you're replying to one message, but actually be answering another). Sometimes letting "autocomplete" finish an e-mail address on the "To:" or "Cc:" line invites lots of problems. I once sent a story pitch to a source named Stu instead of an editor named Stu. Taking unnecessary shortcuts can lead to more e-mail in your inbox and more headaches when you're out of the office.

Mind your e-mail manners. Use "follow up" and priority flags sparingly. Most of the e-mail experts I talked with said it's actually better to allow the recipient to determine the priority, not the sender. And features such as "reply to all" should only be tapped when protocol demands that every recipient is in the loop on a piece of business correspondence. Last but not least, create clear subject lines, say "Action Required" in the subject line if your e-mail is lengthy but includes a call to action, and, conversely, say "" for "end of message" in the subject line if you've said it all in that space.

I've counted 974 messages received since I started writing this column four hours ago. That's more than 240 e-mails an hour. Maybe you don't get that many messages. But ask yourself. The next time you go on the road, is your Outlook application set up to handle what it does get? And do you know what you're going to do with the e-mails?

Getting to know Outlook before you take off might make your next trip run a lot smoother. Take it from a guy who now has 1,028 messages in his inbox. You'll thank me for it later.

Christopher Elliott is a travel commentator based in Key Largo, Fla. All e-mailed questions may be edited, condensed or republished at the site's discretion.

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