It is a constant battle in my job to stay on top of my inbox. Inspired by how effective tags are at sorting and organising stuff I decided to see if I could hack tagging into Outlook.
After some tweaking and playing around I hit upon the following technique. It is based in part around David Allen’s Getting Things Done methodology (which I also use).
This method works in both Outlook 2000 and Outlook 2003. The screen shots and instructions here are for Outlook 2003.
Step 1: Customise Current View
The first step in reaching email-nirvana is open the “Customise Current View” window. To do this, open “View | Arrange By | Current View | Customise Current View…”
This will bring up the “Customise View” window.
Step 2: Categories
The next step is to add the “Categories” field to your inbox. Click on “Fields…” from the “Customise View” window.
You should see this screen,
From the left-hand list, choose “Categories” and click “Add”. It should appear in right-hand list as displayed. Click “OK” to close the window.
Step 3: Group By
Back at the “Customise View” screen, clicking “Group By…” to bring up the following window:
In the first drop-down box select “Categories” as shown. Click “OK” to return to the “Customise View” screen.
Step 4: In-cell Editing
This is where the power comes from! Click on “Other Settings…” to get this screen:
Tick the “Allow in-cell editing” box, highlighted in red. Click “OK” to accept the changes and close the window.
Click “OK” again on the “Customise View” screen to close the window and see your changes applied.
That’s Outlook successfully configured!
What’s happened so far?
Ok, quick recap. We’ve added an extra field (”Categories”) to the main inbox view and arranged the emails into groups based on their category. The reason we have used “Categories” is because an email can belong to more than one category and therefore multiple tags. In this scenario categories are tags.
Checking the “Allow in-cell editing” box turns the inbox into a spreadsheet like grid were some cells are editable. This allows you to quick and easily add tags to your incoming emails. Word of warning, since every cell is editable, it is possible to edit the subject - so be careful where you click.
Step 5: Using tags in Outlook
After closing the “Customise View” window in Step 4 you’ll notice that all your emails are now under the category “(none)”.
Now click into the category cell of the first email in the list. Enter your tags separating them with a “,” (comma).
After you hit enter or move out of the cell, that email will be filed under each of the tags you entered. If you’ve given the email more than one tag it will appear under more than one category group.
Tips
If you label a tag starting with an ‘@’ symbol, that tag will appear at the top of the list of categories. I use ‘@action’ for emails I have to do something about and ‘@waiting for’ for emails I am expecting someone else to do something about. This is the beginnings of a Getting Things Done implementation.
If you press ‘return’ or ‘enter’ after typing in your tags the cursor will automatically be moved into the categories cell of the next email making it quick and easy to tag up a long list of new emails.
That’s it!
I hope you found this useful and easy to implement. If you have any problems get in touch and I’ll be happy to help.
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