A short video showing how I used to use Outlook to tame my inbox. Bad news though: these advanced features are probably going away.
This has been a Johnny.Decimal blog post notification; see jdcm.al/21.05
Outlook has gone from one extreme to the other. The āoldā Outlook was fussy, confusing and ugly. The new Outlook is basically useless.
Hopefully, they make āGoldilocks Outlookā at some point in the future.
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I think I donāt get quite that many emails but I have a different automation approach that works extremely well for me. I should post a thorough write-up of it, but hereās the gist of it:
- I have index subfolders, like you show here.
- I do not have a custom search folder. I also do not use āmove conversationā. Instead, I have Outlook rules that say, essentially, "if the subject contains ā#23.16ā then move it to that folder. Itās easy to add this rule because itās not very often that I create new index values.
- In every message I compose (new or reply), I add the ID like ā#23.16ā to the end of the subject line. Easy. I also add a task flag to my outgoing emails, but only if I need to keep track and follow up later.
- I also have a simple Outlook rule that gives every incoming email a task flag (due today). This is what frees me from the Inbox and moves my focus to the Task view.
- Because of this, I almost never work in the āMailā view at all, except when Iām looking up past correspondence. In daily work, I am mostly in the āTaskā view. Iāve set it to group by date, so it automatically has ānext monthā, ānext weekā, āthis weekā, ātomorrowā, and finally āTODAYā which is the only one I actively look at, the rest are collapsed.
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Now I no longer have emails ā I have tasks!
. - At this point, I have everything sorted nicely, and everything in my daily Task view. At the start of the day, I look through the daily Task view and determine whether the items are relevant today or should be postponed to a later date. Postponing is nice
but it also feels good to know that I wonāt forget, because Tasks will bring it to my attention when the time is right. By the way, things left over from yesterday are automatically red because they are overdue. - Then I apply the GTD mindset and pick the first item in the list. Does this take less than 2 minutes, then it gets done immediately. That keeps me working really fast. Otherwise I will plan when to work on that. Next! This is how I go through my task list very fast.
- When I am between tasks, or have some downtime or breathing room, I also review the task list to see if thereās anything special that needs attention. If not, again just work from the top.
- New emails coming are either (a) sorted by existing rules, and ready to process, or (b) itās a new conversation and I quickly move it to the proper folder (itās already in my task list, so I only do this so I can find it later) and maybe set up a new rule if thereāll be more mails like that (notifications).
Boom! Nine steps to efficient emails.
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Hi Johnny, thanks for this and the rest of your work. A question on this post: to what extent can your approach be replicated in Apple Mail? (Have you tried?)
Not at all, alas. It was only Outlook in its previous version that had such powerful features.
Or ā¦ sorry, not necessarily true. Thereās nothing stopping you from creating folders and using mail rules to filter things in there. But itāll be a sad copy of what I show in the video.
I dare say there are other mail apps that allow you to filter that are more powerful than Mail.app.
It feels like the days of āmanaging your emailā are over. Just let the AI 
sort it out for you!
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And on that note, Recall in Windows 11 may do the same for everything else that one does on a computer, tooā¦ If you can stomach the privacy concerns, anyway. I wonder if humanity will just give up on organizing information manually in the future.
I think that would be sad. Organizing information helps me see who I am at a specific timepoint, and helps me clarify whatās important to me. It would be a loss for humanity if fewer people discovered that significance for themselves.
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Something about which I think deeply, given that itās how I pay the rent.
Eventually, as in on an infinite timescale, yeah. We should get to the point where information can just be called up at-will. You donāt see Jean-Luc Picard clicking through folders to find his Word document.
But this round of AI isnāt close to that. LLMs donāt even try to solve this problem, although Iām sure some other AI startup with some other technology is.
Iām still not worried. Like @clappingcactus says, some of us want to organise our own information. It gives us ā¦ something, some sense of self, of comfort ā¦ which is different depending on who you are.
And, today, right now, most people donāt bother. 90%? 99%? Itās high. Most people just let the chaos reign. See: any workplace.
The 1% are here, or over at PARA or Zettelkasten or tagging with Karl Voit or whatever they enjoy. And I think that this 1% will want to organise their own stuff for some time to come.
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(A bit random for my first post, but I couldnāt resist jumping into this threadā¦)
Maybe we will eventually co-evolve with computer code, and actually function optimally as a symbiotic system and feel great, but it seems that for now, the accepted wisdom is that humans have a certain psychological makeup which requires a bit of friction and effort in any achievements in order to have a truly satisfying sense of self.
Or maybe itās not the friction and effort, but the fact that we have an over-large visual cortex (insert some citations about how much percentage of neurons are related to visual processing, or about how the neuronal activity of imagining is indistinguishable from actually seeing something). Thus, we need to have some kind of visual/spatial map of knowledge, otherwise we canāt really grasp it. So I suspect Picard still has some kind of graphical file manager metaphor on his tablet. Three centuries isnāt enough time for evolution to replace spatial cognition with some alternative (some kind of electromagnetic sensing of where on a storage medium a particular file is??)
Back to emailā¦
Back on the original topic, Iām working on setting up notmuch (command-line email indexing) as part of my new JD system. Itās a full-text indexing and tagging system for mail, so constructing your own āviewsā of your email is a first-class behaviour. So first-class, in fact, that you kinda have to make your own inbox if you want it by creating up a rule to tag newly indexed email with the tag āinboxā. By extension, you can dispense with the classic inbox entirely and move stuff straight to your working folders (which are just tags). So I think it is perfectly suited for the approach outlined in the video. Iāll report back when Iāve got it set up ā¦
About GUIās and CLIās ā¦
Referencing my comments about visual thinking, Iām a command-line geek but mainly out of ideological necessity. I have come to believe that GUIās are better interfaces because we humans are visual thinkers (all of us, not just the so-called right-brain visual thinkers ā for us, even more so). I use programs like notmuch because I care about privacy and freedom and using hardware as long as possible, and because their features arenāt going to go away because of corporations chasing revenue or buzzwords, and because developing CLI apps is faster and easier than GUI apps. But if there were graphical applications that didnāt violate those other important principles, I would certainly prefer them.
I canāt NOT use email or outlook at my work so whilst it is a luxury for some to opt out, I have no choice.
I think email is literally the biggest organising issue for all of us - my home organising system is easy in comparison ( loving the Life Admin template you have launched recently).
So I know you say that you are over it and glad to be out of it, but solving the email organising challenge is one that some of us just canāt escape and we need help!
I totally understand this. This is the sort of job that I used to have.
āHeard!ā, as they say on the cooking shows. So letās use this thread as a place to start, itās as good as any.
Bring me up to speed. Iāve been away from corporate for a year+ now. What version of Outlook is everyone using, are you gradually migrating to/will you eventually migrate to ānew Outlookā?
Because the tool totally changes the game here. Old Outlook was a powerful beast. New Outlook gives you essentially nothing. So we can still solve the problem,[1] weāll just need to approach it a different way.
Probably. No promises on this one! ā©ļø
We use Outlook 365 desktop at work. (āWorkā is a K-12 school in Melbourne, Australia. Iām not a teacher. I get 120+ emails a day on average - nuts!).
The ātry the new Outlookā is ignored by me and most, if not all, of my colleagues.
I have not heard of any plans to force the new.
I/We will hang on for as long as we can to the old!
I think it is worth taking a shot to solve but unfortunately Iām not a programmer - I am in finance so spreadsheets are my thing and I make limited use of ārulesā in outlook at the moment.
I heard from a friend ā also in Melbourne ā that their kids/teachers now have Teams! My god thatās a horrific thought.
So does O365 still do the sort of stuff as shown on my current page?
Yes you are correct - my school has totally gone for Teams and in fact is saying that it will āreplace emailā -
As far as I can tell it does allow the rules - for example, I set up a rule to move all emails with [01.23] in the subject line or body into a particular folder and it worked fine.