The 2 best ways I set up folders in Outlook

Have you had that feeling of being constantly overwhelmed when looking at your emails? I certainly have! So I am going to show you how to get rid of that feeling and stop emails getting in the way of everything with 2 simple folder setup strategies.

We will start basic and discuss how your main folders should be organised. These will be the lifeblood of how you organise everything. Then further in, we will discuss how to lay out the sub-folders within that.

So lets begin…

Folder Design | Main Folders

Your main folders are the first step into cleaning up your inbox. These folders should be very basic and be the backbone of your email system. Main folders should be formatted in one of two distinct ways to make sure they are both easy to understand and effective at accomplishing our goal. These two ways are as follows:

1.) Action Orientated Sorting

2.) Category Orientated Sorting

We will go through what Action Orientated Sorting is first and then we will dive into my favourite, Category Orientated Sorting.

Action Orientated Sorting:

This where you set up your main folders based on what you plan to do with the emails. Email Items will not be set up in folders under different supplier names, or categorised as something like ‘Invoices’. This set up is a bit unique, but that is because they will be focused on ACTION.

For example:
Read Only = Emails that do not need a response and are exclusively for the reading and storing of information
Downloads = Emails that involve downloading attachments (think designs, invoices, spreadsheets, etc)
Follow Up = Emails that need to be revisited in the future to check in with the receiver/sender
Review = Emails that contain details that require reviewing (think tasks to be done, contracts to sign, etc)

You can set these up however you like, but the goal here is that the folders must be categorised in a way that represents what you will do when you see them. The benefits to this are that, in any given folder you know exactly what style of email you will find and you will be able to batch email tasks together based on this. The negatives to this however is that looking for specific companies, contacts or categories of items forces you to either search for them or create additional sub-folders.

This set up is particularly good if all emails in a given mail folder are of the same or similar action priority. For example, If you get 50-100 invoices a day from customers, along with 50-100 sales enquires a day from customers, and a whole host of service contracts to review every day for said customers but no customer is more important than the other and you serve a market where no customer requires quicker processing than another, you would benefit from this strategy because each folder will represent certain actions that need to be done. Not only keeping track of where you are in your workload but allowing for the time blocking of these tasks to make things more efficient.

Where this set up fails however is when you have a highly variable business that has many different levels of priorities for the same types of action items. This is where Category Orientated Sorting can often be a benefit which we will discuss now.

Category Orientated Sorting:

In opposition to Action Orientated Sorting, this strategy changes the focus towards what your priorities are, not what actions you need to take. These main folders will be built around what you focus on.

For example:
Customers = All emails, whether its enquiries, payments, contracts, etc that are from customers or potential customers
Admin = Employee payroll, employee contracts, communication with suppliers, etc.
Business = regulation and licencing, potential business opportunities, etc.
Suppliers = Every supplier your business uses in one spot, all their tracking emails, payments and invoices, product line changes, etc.

This model is far harder to provide generic examples as it depends on every business and is exactly why it works so well for businesses that have multiple changing priority levels. The aim for these folders is that they should NOT be specific, like a folder for a certain customer for example. Doing this would make the inbox far too hard to navigate and make it a nightmare to manage and adjust in the future. The folders should be generic, cover-all categories, that have clearly defined meanings and differences between each other so that they can be used as sorting buckets.

The benefits of this structure is that it can be designed in a way that targets where your email demand comes from opposed to what email demand you get while also providing easy to navigate folders that people outside of those that do email in company can understand.

The negative to this however is that it makes it harder to batch certain tasks together and same for the negative in Action Orientated Sorting, you will either need to search for the emails or create additional sub-folders.

Folder Design | Sub-folders

Now that you have picked your folder sorting system, we must now layout how we set up the sub-folders in this system. It once again depends on the framework your have chosen for your main folders and we will go through both.

Action Orientated Sorting:

Since you have already sorted by the action you plan to take, from here we set up sub-folders to differentiate emails by their category and source so that everything is easily accessible. For the sake of clarity we will define these.

Category = What is the email about
Source = Who has sent the email

Which of these two that should be focused on will be determined by your business size. For a small to medium business, it is often easier and more efficient to have these sub-folders sorted by the source. If you are a larger business however, you might struggle to track everything and what you need to attend to, in which case category should be the focus.

Example 1 (small to medium business):
Main - Read Only
Secondary - Company 1
Tertiary - Announcements

You may only have 5 companies that send you read only announcements, so sorting by source means at any given time you can see if a company has sent out a new announcement that is relevant to you. Then, you can do secondary sorting via priority if neccessary. It may be unneccessary for your business but once again it depends on the importance of everything.

If some read only emails from a company requires immediate reading, having a tertiary folder can help separate these from the rest of the read only emails from them. An example would be if you have outsourced your IT department and you need to be notified about outages, problems with your website, customer information breaches, etc.

Example 2 (larger business):
Main - Read Only
Secondary - Announcements
Tertiary - Company 1

The difference here seems small, but if your scale of business operations is much larger, having 100 sub-folders for each company can be excessive and should be avoided where possible. And with scale, will also come a larger volume of emails which if separated by company can become very easy to lose track of and miss critical emails that needed urgent attention.

in this set up, all read only emails that are in the form of an announcement are automatically placed into the secondary ‘Announcements’ folder, not into the tertiary company folder. The reason for this is as mentioned before, volume is just too high to make this work. Instead, you move the email to its designated company once it has been dealt with. This way, all unread announcements have their own folder and will not be lost due to the incoming volume. Then, once it is dealt with, it can still be sorted to its tertiary company folder so you can maintain a history of all important emails for a given company.

This strategy does fall victim to a lack of priority between sources but helps manage larger volumes of emails in the inbox easier.

In both of these strategies, emails of one type are easily located and actioned but at the sacrifice of being more indescriminate in regards to priority and what the email is actually for. If this is important to how you do emails, the category orientated sorting and its subsequent sub-folders will be a better fit as we will discuss in the coming section.

Category Orientated Sorting:

This section will discuss how we should layout sub-folders under the Category Orientated Sorting system. The set-up style can be repeated from the Action Orientated Sorting section with similar results with the caveat being that Category Orientated Sorting has a larger threshold for company size before you are forced to sort by priority first. The reason for this is because you are already sorting by categories and often any given contact will only fall into one category bucket. Contacts will occasionally fall into multiple buckets, but this is rare and often not a concern when you take into account the below.

The benefit of Category Orientated Sorting that we will address here that Action Orientated Sorting can often struggle with is that many times you do not need to sort by company or priority and can instead further sort incoming emails by sub-categories and then use colour coded tags (we will discuss this in another post) to determine progress, source and priority.

For Example:
Main - Invoices
Secondary - Unpaid Invoices
Secondary - Paid Invoices

Whether we like it or not, invoices need to be paid, no matter which company they are from. So a main folder for invoices makes sense; however, we should have a set up to know if they have been paid or not. In this case, we split the folder into two separate folders. When invoices come into the inbox, they are automatically allocated to the main invoices folder, then upon viewing them, if they are not paid, will be moved to the unpaid invoices sub-folder.

This now is a great way to keep track of new invoices, unpaid invoices and paid invoices from all companies very easily. This is the main benefit of Category Orientated Sorting. We will discuss the automations and colour coding in another post, but this set up still works if you employ it manually and you are diligent.

Closing Remarks

These folder systems can get infinitely more complex from here and can allow you to (with the power of VBA and some custom inbox rules) to dictate EXACTLY how you want your inbox to appear. This can feel empowering, but it is important to remember it is easy to over optimise. Making things perfect often means other areas suffer to achieve this result.

As an example, you could achieve a perfectly divided list of company folders in every action folder you have. This will mean you will always be able to instantly find any company’s emails when searching for them. But, this will come at the sacrifice of your inbox being a nightmare to navigate, manage and track. A balance must be struck between ease of access/tracking and adequate sorting. This balance will depend on your personal temperament, your goals, the size of your business, the number of employees you have, what industry you are in, etc.

This can be hard, and reverting changes to how your inbox is layed out after the fact can be a real pain so it is important to spend a bit of time planning what your dream inbox will look like and what compromises you are willing to make to have it happen.

Best of luck with your inboxing journey, and lets organise!

Cheers,
Nathan.