Best way to organize 100-200 emails/day in Outlook?

I’m not a lawyer, but I get a metric ton (yep, I weighed it) of email every day in my job. Others have mentioned GTD, and that’s the general process I use to manage everything. But something I haven’t heard mentioned yet: only touch an email once. Triage it as it comes in.

Does it need a reply? Can you reply right now? Reply to it and move it out of your inbox.

Is it something you need to act on later? Make an action in your to-do system. That can be as simple as (in my case) dragging it to Apple Reminders to create a new action with a handy clickable link back to the original email, and setting a meaningful, actionable title like “Review Joe’s proposal”. Now it’s in my actual to-do system, and not a ghost of a vaguely formed request sitting in my inbox and taunting me.

If it’s useful information, archive it, either in the appropriate mail folder or your / your company’s DMS. For my personal use, I adore DEVONthink.

If it’s not something you need to reply to, or act on later, or store for future reference, delete it. I get literally dozens of requests for my time every day, from spammers or trade groups or people who want to sell my company something. I don’t owe those emails my attention.

An email inbox is a terrible task manager. Don’t let it become that for you. When an email comes in, process it one time and then get it out of your sight.

I generally subscribe to the GTD/inbox zero approach mentioned in one of the other comments. In this system, after reading an email it should be processed into your task management system, unread emails are waiting to be processed and read emails have already been processed, so no need to worry in either case.

To process an email means to read it and determine what action is necessary and, if relevant, file in the task system. The possible outcomes from reading an email are: Do, Defer, Delegate, or Archive.

You should Do something immediately if it’s very urgent or quick to do. Otherwise Defer the action for later by saving a task in your management system (not in you inbox). Delegate and Archive are pretty straightforward. Read up on GTD method for more details.

ONE EMAIL RULE

Email in your inbox is only for email where you are on the TO: line.

All other emails (BCC'ed or CC'ed) should go into a folder called "Inbox - CC."

That's it.

https://www.hanselman.com/blog/one-email-rule-have-a-separat...

1. Get rid of all the crap as fast as possible: delete spam, unsubscribe from mailing lists that you don't need. 2. Setup folders and filter rules to have mails sorted automatically. For example, you could have one folder per project or one folder per client. How you structure your folders depends on your work process. 3. Use the Eisenhower Method when going through new mail. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_management#The_Eisenhower...)

I’m an attorney at a major firm and receive a couple to a few hundred emails daily. In general, auto-filtering emails away from the inbox is not possible, because you really may need to look at every email for possible relevance to a matter.

My system is simple: a general archive folder, matter-specific folders, and then a to-do list for longer-running things. I aim for inbox zero: every message in the inbox is either one I haven’t reviewed yet or one that I can act on quickly. Every email gets read, acted on or added to the to-do list if necessary, and then filed.

Outlook’s search feature works tolerably well. I search for emails from senders, to recipients, or within certain folders many times a day.

100-200 is pretty low for a busy attorney. Your firm will have a DMS of some kind (likely iManage or NetDocuments—hopefully not Worldox or something similarly outdated). Most people let the emails accumulate through the day and file them first thing in the morning, at the end of the day, or while on conference calls.

My tips are to enable the CC-yourself option in Outlook to make sure you catch all of your sent emails, and to otherwise keep your sent emails in your sent mailbox until you record your time.

A lot of attorneys hold off on filing emails entirely until they put their time in (i.e. record down their hours for billing purposes). But typically all you really need is what is in your sent email box, which can then be deleted. And keeping up on filing your other emails helps other attorneys and makes you look good.

I've been using the following system for a few years now and I am able to handle a high volume of emails with it.

1. Create categories: .Urgent, .When Possible, PJ Your Project, PJ ...

2. Create two folders: .Action [Set "View" to "Date (Conversations)], .Archive [Set "View" to "Categories"]

3. Create Quick Steps: "Action - Urgent" (Actions: Clear Categories, Move to .Action, Categorize message: .Urgent, Mark as Read, Shortcut: CTRL+Shift+1), "Action - When possible" (Actions: Clear Categories, Move to .Action, Categorize message: .When possible, Mark as Read, Shortcut: CTRL+Shift+2), "Archive" (Actions: Move to .Archive, Categorize message [Leave the category empty to be prompted for the category], Mark as Read, Shortcut: CTRL+Shift+3)

4. Schedule email sessions in your calendar (max. 2 times/day for a fixed time period): For each email: Delete or use the shortcuts to assign them as "Urgent", "When possible" or "Archive" them. Inbox should be empty afterwards. Do not take a look into the inbox outside of scheduled inbox sessions.

5. Work on the emails: Work on the emails in the ".Urgent" folder first. If you got time, work on the emails in the ".Action" folder next.

Are you at a firm? I’d encourage you to ask the people on your team. It wouldn’t be a weird question to ask a fellow associate (or if you are comfortable, the partner).

You also want to make sure you understand your firm’s email archiving and retention policy. Some firms have specific controls in place (systems that delete uncategorized emails from your inbox after a certain amount of time).

I worked on M&A deals, but doing the IP/Privacy support and not running the whole deal. My structure while working at a bigger firm, which wasn’t perfect, but worked, was to have a folder for each client and a folder for each big client project/deal. Then just keep moving emails to each project folder as they came in. I didn’t really trust rules to do it for me automatically, but that’s just me.

I also set up Outlook to file reply messages in the folder where the original email was. Then I would generally respond only after I’d move the email.

I feel like I’m rambling now, but in case this is remotely helpful, here are a few other thoughts/pain points: 1. I kept my tasks list separate from my inbox. 2. Hot keys are great, especially for moving to folders and finding emails in a thread. There’s not much you need a mouse for after a while. 3. Moving emails to folders is slow if outlook has to populate the huge list of potential folders each time. If you have lots of clients, it may make sense to split things up alphabetically first (Clients A-G in one folder, etc.). 4. This system was also helpful for syncing emails to the correct folder in the firm document management system, which is a whole separate conversation.

Feel free to disregard, but I figured I’d pass along my system, as it seems to be pretty different from what I’m reading here. Firms are interesting animals, especially where record keeping is involved.

  Mark as spam

I am cheekily serious. Your problem does not generalize. The people to ask our your coworkers. Probably starting with your direct supervisor.

Because the organization of email works best if it correlates with the way you have to use them to do your job. That determines what is a courtesy copy and what is critical to your attention and what can be completely ignored.

It determines whether the high bit is client or date or buyer or seller or something else.

Use mail rules to sort email into folders automatically. Try to keep email you don't need to read immediately out of your inbox. Use mail rules to highlight messages sent only to you, or where you are in the to: section so that they stand out. Set up mailing lists for each project to make sorting simpler. Use auto archive to keep the size of your inbox in check. Make sure you have a search index set up so you can quickly find emails buried away in archives. Make use of the "tasks" feature to flag emails you need to respond to later.

I highly recommend Getting Things Done. It's a whole system, but there are lots of small rules you can extract and use to great effect.

For instance:

- If an email takes 2 min to answer, do it.

- If it requires an action from you, but at another time. Move it to a "next action" folder (that you'll work through when you have the time).

- Also "archive" and "references" folders are useful, possibly organized by project.

- "Inbox zero" to reduce stress and keep yourself sane.

So this volume is an email every 3-5 minutes, for 9 straight hours. Presumably this type of job is not an 8-5 deal so you'll be answering emails early in the morning and late at night, but let's assume there are at least some periods during the work day where it will approach that volume. Let's also assume you've already removed all the newsletters, spam, etc. and these are 100-200 emails you have to at least look at every day, and that you can't just ignore or delete a chunk of them.

The hardest part will be filtering the (as @sumthinprofound put it) the "do" from the "defer." If you're starting out you probably can't delegate much beyond the admin stuff. Utilize tagging and importance levels. If something is sent only to you, it's probably more important than something sent to 15 people. You can't jump every time an email comes in or you won't be able to do more than a few minutes of real work at a time. So, try to get away with only actively checking email every 30-60 minutes and taking a dedicated block of time to reply to everything that you can. Your particular org structure and culture will determine how exactly this plays out, but when I was running a brick & mortar business I would spend about 30-45 minutes on emails twice a day, at 8am and 7pm (give or take). I was only looking at 50-60 real emails a day though and that time usually included whatever work I needed to do to "complete" that email.

You'll want to get to the point where you can be alerted to truly critical emails, but the other stuff just sort of sits there until you can get to it. It will take some time to figure that out, and only you know what the reaction at your work will be if you miss a critical email for half an hour, to know how strict you can be with your filtering (stricter is better obviously but you will end up with false negatives and stuff sitting in your inbox for an hour that really should have been addressed within five or ten minutes).

For auto-sorting mail I use Sieve. It seems to be available for Outlook. It's a protocol for a mail client to talk to a server, along with a language for making processing scripts, which is a bit awkward if you don't care for code. But there are nice front-ends that can magic the code away.

I realise that wasn't exactly what OP was asking, but one way of handling mail you don't have time to read is to file it, and Sieve is an auto-filer.

I once had a colleague with a stack of 3 inboxes on his desk, labelled "Too Boring", "Too Difficult" and "Too Late". You could try something like that :-)

One technique I used in Outlook back when I was customer-facing was to have color rules, so an email with only me in the To: line would be green, me in the CC/BCC red. So you can glance at your unread/read inbox and get a signal as to what you might need to read first.

I’m sure you could do this with folders or tags in gmail, I found it useful to be able to see everything unread at a glance.

Never got to inbox zero consistently but archiving the “done” emails to stay as close as possible helps.

More important I think is having some system for managing your todos, which you need to be able to create in one click from an email. I ended up with an outlook task list, I think it’s useful to be able to trigger an email to be “due in 2 days” if you need to say check in on a thread.

I used exchangelib with python to organize by labeling and moving to folders emails based on different conditions. Simple string matches as well as iirc even yara rule matches. It was surprisingly easy. Nowadays O365 app setup is a pain. But I don't know if you are comfortable coding or not.

A simple way is to setup server side rules to move messages to different folders. That's pretty much how every place with high volume shared mailbox works in my experience (1000+ a day).

This is the best resource on how to use Outlook that I have ever read: http://www.danielmoth.com/Blog/Processing-Email-In-Outlook.a.... It's complicated, and has a fairly steep setup cost (don't forget to check "and stop processing rules" when creating your rules) but it's been working great for me.

I work as an investment banking associate (M&A mostly) and get similar email volume. In outlook I have a folder for each deal and within each folder I have sub folders for the different workstreams (e.g. materials drafting, VDR, model, outreach, IOIs, etc.). I clean out my inbox at least once per day depending on how slammed I am. I leave action items or follow ups in my inbox and folder anything else. I arrange my emails by conversation (go to the “View” tab in outlook and there should be an option there) as this aggregates by subject line and makes it easy to follow and file. You can go through emails quickly by selecting an email and using CTRL+SHIFT+V to bring up the folder pop up and typing in the name of the folder you’d like to send it to.

This obviously takes work to implement but will keep you on top of things and your clients happy.

Based on the experience of ~500 email/day: I check emails every 1-2 hours and act on it in 5 minutes.

- stuff I can immediately delete

- stuff I can respond with one liner on the spot

- stuff I need to do some work on, I leave it separate for later that day or I forward it to myself for later

This is based on urgency and importance, that is easy to assess. Reading an email takes from a few seconds to a minute, 200 emails should not take more than 30 minutes to check. If you leave it to pile up, it is harder to manage (at least for me).

One more thing I do is I ask my team no avoid sending me emails I don't need to act on and I don't need to be informed about. I also tell them to put me in CC if I don't need to act. It reduces the number of emails I receive and it makes it easier to evaluate. On average I have less than 50 emails per day that I really need to read and less than 25 are important.

I really like Opera mail, but it's no longer under development, not even sure if you can download it any longer. You could train the mail client to auto sort e-mails using bayesian filters- think of it like having 10 different "spam" folders, but one of the folder is messages about domains, another is weekly server logs, another is personal e-mails, and every client or project has it's own folder, and the email clients sorts the mail for you! You could also tag e-mails so you could have a list of e-mails with the tag "important note", or "receipt". It also "auto"-sorted the mail by date, so you could group by month or week.

Unless someone does it first, I will probably make my own mail client with these old Opera mail features.

For organizing a large collection of items, searching is preferred to sorting.

With sorting, you must assume how you will want to access the information in the future and put the item in a bucket. That assumption can be wrong, or you can know that something fits in multiple buckets. A particular medical bill could go in buckets "Bills to Pay", "Provider X", or "Tax-related Bills".

Tagging (multi-attribute) is superior to sorting (single attribute, equivalent to a single folder/bucket). You could assign all the above tags to the example medical bill. Tagging really helps when the search engine cannot extract enough information to query on. Especially for short texts or non-textual items, adding contextual tags may be necessary for searchability.

IANAL but a software developer so I don't know how well this translates to your profession, but here goes nothing. I've handled persistent volumes of 200 mails per day just fine using something like GTD / inbox zero. The volume of mails is not the critical part, it's the work that the mails represent.

The key part for me was realizing that e-mail is just a way of funneling work into my todo list, and that I can only have a single todo list. It's not possible to do two things at once, so it's not possible to have a list of work to complete that cannot be ordered sequentially. You therefore don't need lots of lists, you just need one list that is well-tended. I keep an eye on the work ahead to proactively take steps to curate my todo list and to gather information, but once I get to work I focus entirely on the top task.

I scan e-mails a few times a day. Anything that can be handled quickly is done immediately. Everything else either is put on the todo list or it is returned to sender. The todo list is a useful tool for refusing work because it helps identify what work gets moved back if the new priority gets put on top. Every mail is touched once (with the exception of replies that result from todo items). Once processed the mails are marked as read and no longer need any actions. I have no folders aside from my inbox and sent folders. I do search my mail archive every once in a while, which I keep in its entirety.

Lots of mails have a context, a project that they belong to. I keep a searchable digital notebook filled with all the notes for these projects. All the snippets of information flowing into my inbox through e-mail get copied over to the notebook and structured in a way that is easy to access. This does add a little bit of extra work when information enters the system, but it saves a lot of time in the long run because of the ease of access and the ability to easily add more context that isn't captured in e-mail.

You may have noticed that I didn't mention specific tools and applications. That's because after exploring lots of options I've found they don't matter all that much when you have a good system. Use whatever works best for you.

There was a good book [0]. If you’re just starting out, try your best for inbox zero.

I used to have 4 categories in outlook called SNA meeting, SNA Errand, SNA waiting.. SNA means strategic next action. It was great because you didn’t have to think about what you’re waiting to do on something.

[0]Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft® Outlook® to Get Organized and Stay Organized

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0735620407/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glt_...

my system:

1. make sure you don't check all the time, set specific hours.

2. Skim, respond right away if possible.

3. If I didn't have time to respond or it was low priority i'd mark as unread.

4. If it was high priority and I didn't have time to respond right then I would carve out time in my calendar to respond.

5. Review your queue of unread regularly but not as often as recent emails.

Generally I could tell how behind I was when traveling by the unread mail counter in outlook. If I prioritized well this seemed to work for me. Folders and filters never seemed to be able to ensure I wasn't missing things.

The easiest change is to route cc’d emails to another folder that you don’t check regularly.

I handle 2x your volume and this was the best change I ever made.

You will need folders and use Outlooks rule management system ti autimatically place all mails with certain subjects or from certain people in appropriate folders.

This works well and is robust. Then you will need a workflow methodology on how often throughout the day you you work with the emails. Foxed points in time is one way to approach it, and not a bad strategy.

quite a bit off topic, but starting a busy time like an M&A lawyer, how do you keep up with and integrate tech in the day-to-day job?

Depending if your mail is internal or not, route all external messages or messages not from certain domains to an external filter. Check that less often.

When you meet with people who email you a lot, sort your inbox by person, and with the list in front of you take a moment to ask them “is there anything you’ve sent me that we need to talk about?”

Set up alerts /notifications for VIPs.

I had built a system that worked very well for me while I was using Outlook and of course I blogged about it: https://www.rockoder.com/2013/10/19/how-to-manage-emails-in-...

Use filters. I've had jobs that receive 3000+ emails a day which aren't a problem because of filters

I wish Outlook would have a rule parameter to identify any emails older than X days. You could pair that with read or not read and just move them to a folder or archive.

Delete 95 percent of them. Most people will not even notice. If someone asks about it promptly respond "sorry,I saw it but haven't gotten to it, let me take a look right I wrap xyz up"

Most emails are useless borderline garbage anyways. I gave up spending too much time on them 15 years ago. Same goes for voicemail. And it rarely is an issue that isn't considered minor

I’m going to offer different advice than most of the advice you see here. I’m a litigator, but also spent some time as an M&A associate as a junior.

I don’t try for inbox zero and I don’t sort things into matter folders. I tried that when I first started out, but things were either out of sight, out of mind or I’d get behind and eventually lose emails to the firm retention policy.

Here’s my system now. Junk/newsletters get deleted ASAP. Things on my to do list get marked as Unread. Emails I don’t need to reference again are marked Read. Everything stays in my inbox until the end of the month. In my inbox folder, I have subfolders for each year and sub-subfolders for each month. At the end of the month, everything I received or sent gets dropped into the folder for that month. Then I make liberal use of the search and sort functions if I need to find things again. This works for me because I’m more likely to remember WHEN I worked on a particular matter than anything else.

If you do want to use matter/deal folders, I recommend you set up your rules to send copies to the folder, not clear your inbox entirely. I have a junior associate right now who regularly misses important emails because she has everything sorted into matter folders and forgets to check them. Or she forgets that she has to manually refresh her folders when checking email on her phone.

Also, as an associate, you usually can’t do the whole “only look at an email once” thing. You’ll often need to do some research or complete some work before you can reply. But! If you’ve been asked to handle something by email, I beg of you, please reply “will do” when you see the email (even if you’re not going to “do” right away) and then immediately put that item on your to do list so you don’t forget. I keep trying to pound this into my junior’s heads. Your senior associates/partners need to know that you’ve seen the email, even if you can’t give a substantive response right away. You’re a star associate if your response is “Will do. Can I get this to you by [time]?”

Similarly, you may be CC/BCC on an email that actually has tasks for you or is something you need to keep track of. For example, you may be the person collecting final signature pages for the team but only be CC on the emails circulating them. Or a partner may reply to an email you were CC on, leave you in CC, but ask you specifically to handle something. Do not assume an email not directed TO you has nothing important for you.

Also, the volume of emails during a deal is insane. During a closing once, I got 600 emails in an 8-hour period. If you’re not careful, you’ll spend your whole day checking email and not actually get any work done. Deals have more urgency than most litigation, so you probably can’t do what I do: turn off all your email notifications and only look at your inbox every couple of hours. Find a system that keeps you in the loop but doesn’t prevent you from working.

Resign