Recently at work my Outlook inbox broke 300 emails. I use my inbox as a place to store important things and to keep tasks that I need to do front-of-mind. I’m also on a bunch of email lists that I don’t really need to be on, but because of the position I’m in I “must” be on them. 

Fortunately, Outlook has rules that allow you to automatically file away messages you don’t need or want to see. There’s one email list I’m on that sends messages from all of our global subsidiaries, and I don’t need to know what they’re all doing with documentation and project management. 

But someday I might, so I can’t just create a rule that deletes them. 

Early on in my career here at this job, I started creating rules that would take each email and sort it into a folder by its project number. I have two main folders: one for North America projects, and one for the rest of the world. I don’t usually filter the NA projects, but I do filter the global ones. 

We have a lot of global projects, so I have a lot of folders with project numbers on them. And, because I’m me, I’m very particular about making sure each project is sorted into the appropriate folder just in case I need it later. 

Outlook rules are a little limited, so I’ve created over 250 rules just for global project messages. That could get messy in Outlook, so I organize the rules alphanumerically. 

There’s no way to do it automatically. That means I have to physically drag each rule through the list to find the right place. It’s drudgery… But it’s also satisfying. For some people, completing a repetitive task can be very fulfilling. I watch the rule names and numbers scroll past until the right one appears, and then I drop the rule in place. Then I scroll back to the top and do it again. And again. And again. 

I try to update my rules every month, but sometimes I get lazy. However, having more than 300 emails in my inbox is also an untenable situation. 

Last week I spent over an hour on this task, and I feel like it was time well spent. My boss might disagree, but it’s not like I had anything else to do. 

On a related topic… 

I hadn’t done my Outlook rules in a few months, and when you’re putting them into Outlook it’s better to use the Outlook Web App because then the emails are filtered at the server level, not the client level. If I put the rules into the Outlook Desktop App, my emails would only be filtered when I log in on my computer, and that would mean more noise on my work phone. The last time I used OWA to put in rules, I was able to get a good rhythm going, using the keyboard as much as possible to speed things along. Well, last week I tried that but the keyboard is no longer the preferred method of entry. I had to keep moving my hand from the mouse to the keyboard and back, because I couldn’t just tab from field to field anymore. I realize most people prefer to use the mouse, but for those of us who are fast typists and power users, we would appreciate it if Microsoft would stop removing keyboard functions from their apps.