Outlook Wrangling 2 - The Cunning Use of Flags

So yesterday we looked at how to make “read” actually mean “read” in Outlook. By doing this we are adding back in a layer of meaning to email. Something marked “read” means I have looked at it, understood it and decided on next actions.

If that next action isn’t get up and talk to the person or reply or anything immediate I use Outlook’s built in flag system.

I have two colors of flags. A red flag means follow up a purple flag means follow up. In other words. a red flag means I have to do something, a purple one means someone else has to do something that I should check up on at some point.

Then I use Outlook’s search folders to create two search folders, one folder for each color flag, and add those folders to my favorites.

I could bore you with how to create search folders, but I’ll let Microsoft do that on their support page.

Tomorrow I’ll talk about the trick I’ve used to keep my Inbox empty for three years!