For those of you that haven't been glued to my twitter updates I'm still in a 3 day lockdown on a pretty exciting project.  I'm doing my best to answer emails and voicemails, so bear with me if you've reached out to me and just haven't heard back yet.

So as is my morning ritual, I'm logged in a bit early to go through my Outlook Inbox and look for any hot items that must get handled today and see if we've received any quick fire drills that need attending.  As I was sifting through the newest additions to my Inbox I was reminded of a posting that Shally did some time ago about getting organized in Outlook - and I thought that I'd share something that I've found most useful since that post.

Now I'm not knocking Shally's advice - getting organized in Outlook is vital for any recruiter that is forced to use it.  Learning to use the filters is an absolute must.  What I have found to be an amazing tool in the last 6 months or so is the ability to tag items in categories as opposed to putting them in folders.

Folders are a bit limiting - and in my mind seem to be a bit lateral in thinking.  Suppose for the moment I've an email from Joe Blow that gives me a tip about a company getting ready to go through some unfortunate downsizing and within that same email Joe mentions a few things that get me thinking about a blog entry I may want to make.... and he just happens to mention a great conference coming up soon that I may want to attend.  (You gotta' love Joe, he's full of great info!)

If I were to use a folder to keep track of this email, where would I put it?  Would it go into a folder for "Blogging Ideas" or "Layoff Updates" or "Conferences/Seminars"....  or just "Great stuff from Joe."
Why use folders when in Outlook I can simply right-click on the email and select 'Categories' and tag the email with all three?  Now if I'm consistant throughout my Outlook Inbox in tagging emails in my defined categories I don't have the nightmare of folders to sift through anymore - I need only right-click on the email column header and select "Sort by Categories" and Bob's Your Uncle! I've got everything in categories of interest rather than trying to remember if I put that great blogging idea into the events folder because the event was before I thought I'd blog about it...

You get the idea.
The true win here is if you'll create filters for keywords or senders that automatically tag messages for you.  I have filters set up to tag travel confirmations, expense reports, messages from my recruiters, etc.

Oh what a wonderful world we live in when we're not afraid of managing our inbox.