Once again, I was reminded recently of things I take for granted. In this case, I pulled up my e-mail during a meeting and our Marketing Manager, Kim, asked why some of my mail was colored blue. This is something I have been doing since Outlook first offered the option to conditionally format mail. Most people know about rules within Outlook – the ability to perform a specific action on a piece of mail based on the sender, the recipient(s), subject, or even keywords in the e-mail. You can have Outlook automatically change the priority, flag an e-mail for follow-up, move it to a specific folder, even automatically reply to the incoming mail. But, you can also use conditional formatting options to help you prioritize e-mail. I asked our CEO, Erik, and our CTO, Jamie, how much mail they get on a daily basis (because I know it is a lot). Maybe you fall into the same category as them – they get a couple hundred e-mails per day, on average. Per day. Staying on top of that much e-mail can be a full time job on its own. Some of it is fluff – general e-mail conversations that happen to include them, but aren’t really important. And some of it is mission critical – e-mail that absolutely needs their respective input. How can they tell what is important and what is not without opening and reading each individual e-mail? The truth is that they cannot. But, they can use conditional formatting to help sift through all of their incoming mail to quickly identify and reply to that which needs to be addressed now. For instance, I highlight messages sent only to me. If I am the only recipient, I am the only one who can possibly reply. Thus, those are a higher priority than e-mails sent to multiple people. So, I have a rule in place to color any e-mail sent only to me in blue. It makes them easy to identify and helps me ensure that I don’t miss any e-mail that is relying on me for a response. It’s really easy to do:
In Outlook 2010, for instance, you can simply go into “View Settings.” From the “view” tab, select “view settings” and click the “conditional formatting” button.
You’ll find that there are some rules in there already – Outlook creates these by default. Click the “Add” button. You’ll see that Outlook creates a rule called “Untitled” and highlights it.
You can click the “Condition” button to identify which mail you want to highlight.
You can fill in words to watch for in the subject line or message body. You can select mail from specific people. You can even use this to highlight messages sent to a specific mailing list. We have a list called MS Sales, which goes out to all the members of the sales team. I have those e-mails selected to be colored maroon to easily identify them. Once you have selected the type of mail you want highlighted, click OK. Now that you have identified what mail you want formatted, you can select how to highlight it. You can click the “Font” button to change the color, style, even the font itself. (As an aside – using several fonts in your inbox tends to clutter things up a bit. I would recommend using one standard font and only change the color and style (italics, bold, etc.) rather than changing the actual font.)
You can create several rules to identify and highlight different kinds of e-mail. The possibilities are virtually limitless. The end result is that you have an inbox that, using color and font styles, quickly allows you to prioritize e-mail in order to even more effectively manage the time you spend in your inbox.
