Organizing your Outlook Inbox

Hello blogging fail, my name is Katie. It's nice to see you. Why haven't I posted lately? Probably because I spend all my time doing 1 of 5 things and therefore would blog about 1 of 5 things.

1. Playing tennis (undefeated and division champs in women's doubles!)
2. Laying on my couch watching countless episodes of Happy Endings, Gossip Girl, Grey's, Hart of Dixie or the latest Jodi Picoult book-turned-movie (great Saturday viewing right there)
3. Talking about how awesome my life is and how great my friends are (been there, done that)
4. Complaining about how no one will date me/I'm impossible to date (been there, done that also)
5. Working (7:30am in the office 6 Fridays in a row!)

Clearly I've already touched on all of those things. So instead, I'll launch into a post about my psychotic organizing tendencies, this time surrounding how to organize my email. Since I started my job in November 2010, I wasn't really sure how to organize for 2011, so I just made a 2011 folder and threw everything in that. Actually, I just made a 2010 folder and threw everything there. You have no idea how much it pains me now, in November 2011, to still be working out of a 2010 folder, but such is life.

Eventually as I got more comfortable with my job, my role, and the 'types' of emails I was going to be receiving and sending, I established a pretty good filing system. Our inboxes have a max limit on the internal server, so I have to continuously move them out of my inbox and into their separate folder.

Is this boring yet? Too bad. Now I'm working on how I'm going to do a better job organizing in 2012 (and how I can ensure that I don't receive an email in mid-November 2012 telling me my folder is now full and I need to break it up. UGH, the horror!)

So, I've decided that instead of dividing first by year and then by topic, I'm going to divide by topic and then by year. My job consists of 3 separate pieces, we'll call them A, B, and C, so I'm going to make 3 .pst folders for each topic, plus one called "Company Info" and one called "Katie" for personal stuff. All personal emails (for now) will get dropped into the Katie folder with no sub-folders. All company-related emails that don't actually pertain to my job but are still important will get dropped into the Company folder with no sub-folders.

I plan to make a 2012 sub-folder for A, B, and C. Then, depending on topic, I'll have sub-folders. It will look something like this:

So there you have it. Yes I greyed out all information that could be tied back to my actual job and company. Yes maybe I'm paranoid. SO WHAT.

So basically, this will (hopefully) minimize the need for folders every year. Although I'm not really sure it makes that big of a difference, I guess I'll try it this way for 2012 and see how it goes. 2013 will be the real test year, because I'll have to decide which way I like better. Maybe I'll keep 2 inboxes in 2013 so I can do it both ways. Told ya I was crazy. Wanna know what also throws a wrench in all of this?

iPhones with work email, that's what. So now my inbox is divided into the same A, B, and C and when those folders get too full then I move them to their respective places so that I can reference them while on my iPhone. I repeat: my life is hard.

Was this even mildly interesting? I taught my mom how to use her Google Reader last night, so maybe that will be my next "I'm Anal and Spend Way Too Much Time Organizing Shit" post.