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Contributed by McGhee Productivity Solutions

Think about the last couple of months and contemplate how much time you spent looking for that important but elusive e-mail message. Would you consider that time well spent? When your e-mail reference system is organized into a useful folder hierarchy, it's easy to file messages for later reference.

In this article, you'll learn:

• How to set up your reference folders
• How to move your e-mail messages
• How to save and delete documents that are attached to e-mail messages

Set up your e-mail reference folders

Creating an effective e-mail folder hierarchy is the key to keeping your e-mail organized. By creating your folder hierarchy in advance and basing it on your meaningful objectives and supporting projects, you can more easily discern what is worth keeping and what is not.

To create a mail folder in Outlook

1. In Outlook, on the File menu, point to New, and then click Folder.
2. In the Create New Folder dialog box, in the Name box, type the name for the folder.

   These names should match your meaningful objectives and supporting projects, with one folder for each meaningful objective and a subfolder for each supporting project.

   

3. In the Create New Folder dialog box, in the Folder contains box, click the type of folder that you want to create. For storing e-mail items, click Mail and Post Items.

   

4. In the Select where to place the folder list, select a location for the folder, and then click OK.

   Note  For information about the advantages and disadvantages of different locations for your reference folders, click "Create an effective reference system" in the See Also box.

Move your e-mail messages

When messages arrive, they typically go straight to your Inbox. To organize the messages that you want to retain in your e-mail reference system so that you can easily find them later, you need to move them into the folders that you've created.

To move an e-mail message to a folder

• In your Outlook Inbox, click the message you want to move and drag it to the appropriate folder.

Tips

Save and delete attached documents

Often, e-mail messages arrive with an attached document. Whether and how you save the message and the attachment depends on whether the document stands on its own or needs the e-mail message for context or other details.

• If the e-mail message isn't important, just save the document in your My Documents folder and delete the e-mail message.
• If the e-mail message contains important information, save it to an Outlook folder in your e-mail reference system.
• If the document is not meaningful without the e-mail message, save both in your e-mail reference system.

Tip  When you can, store documents on your hard disk, and not in an Outlook folder. For one thing, you probably have more storage space on your hard disk. For another, the search function in your e-mail reference system searches through only e-mail items, and not the documents attached to them, while the search function in the My Documents folder does search through documents.

Saving attachments

In Outlook, you can choose to save all of the documents attached to a message or save just the selected ones.

To save multiple attachments to a folder on your hard disk

To save a single attachment

Deleting attachments

To delete an attachment from the Attachments line

To delete an attachment from the message body

Save time and reduce stress

An effective e-mail reference system helps you find and file critical data easily, and it can dramatically reduce the amount of time that you spend managing your e-mail. Statistics show that using an organized system can save you up to 50 minutes each day — and that adds up to almost three weeks a year! What would you do with an extra three weeks a year? It's well worth putting in the time and effort to create and maintain a reference folder system, because you'll have extraordinary time savings as a result.

About the author   McGhee Productivity Solutions (MPS) provides consulting and education services designed to increase productivity and quality of life.