Achieve INBOX ZERO on Outlook (in 10 minutes)!

on a typical morning at work my Outlook inbox might start off looking like this and if you could just give me 5 minutes my main inbox is now empty and I can focus my time on follow-up waiting and read through emails want to get to inbox zero let's get started all right if you're not familiar with the inbox zero workflow there are two big benefits first you'll never again get distracted by emails you have already dealt with and second this workflow makes it impossible for you to miss important emails in this video we'll first run

through the setup process for Microsoft Outlook then go through the workflow you'll use to get to inbox zero every single day and end with some drawbacks because the original inbox zero workflow was designed with Gmail in mind all right well first go to settings up here turn off focused inbox change the display density to Cozy uh group into conversations and choose the newest on top for arrange the reading Pane and although this is a personal preference I like to have the reading pane show on the right here by the way the steps I'm going through

today is for the free version of outlook on the web and everything can be undone so you can always go back to the unproductive workflow where your inbox is always overflowed I'll come up with better jokes um now let's click into view all settings and under mail layout scroll all the way down and under uh what do you want to happen when you move or delete the item you are viewing select open the previous item sounds weird but trust me on this and and under what do you want us to do when you first sign

in select let me select which message to read first save settings then let's head on over to the general Tab and under categories create five categories for now I've already created a follow-up waiting readr to save time and I've added the 01 02 and 03 here to make sure they're pinned up on top uh for the blue category let's just change this to trips save and for the orange category let's change this to newsletter and add an emoji for Mac is command control space uh email to really spice it up and let's change the color

to Gray and click save so you should now be left seeeing this next step favorite all five of these categories like this then go to the accessibility tab to make sure the Outlook keyboard shortcut option is selected and save settings going down to search make sure the Search scope is all folders when searching from the Inbox and uncheck show top three most results here and click save settings I have no idea why Microsoft even has this as an option because if you keep this checked and you search for an email the same email shows up

twice so it's a really confusing user experience anyways after making those changes and everything is saved click escape to go back to the main inbox view make sure the inbox folder is favored then go to the sent items folder and favorite that as well I'm going to drag these s items up here so now you should see inbox sent items and the five categories in the favorite section up top quick vocab lesson before moving forward categories is the equivalent of labels in Gmail and what Microsoft calls rules is just the filter function within Gmail sticking

with the Microsoft jargon in this video there are two types of categories we need to know to make inbox zero work in Outlook pre- categories and action categor newsletter and trips are examples of pre- categories to illustrate find a newsletter in your inbox I hear this productivity ping one is simply amazing uh go to the three dots here advance actions create Rule and select more options name the rule up here and then under add a condition make sure it's from the email address of the newsletter sender and select an action categorize select the category newsletter

and click save what this does is the next time you receive an email from that sender the newsletter category will be automatically applied when the email hits hits your inbox hence the name pre category this will save us a lot of time because we'll never have to manually tag newsletters and trip confirmation emails ever again moving on to action categories the guiding principle here is that there are only four types of actions you will ever take with any kind of email first followup emails are when you are responsible for the outcome and only you can

take action for example your boss asks you a question that you know the answer to waiting emails are for when you are still responsible for the outcome but you need someone else to take action for example your manager wants you to prepare a presentation but you need input from another colleague the readr category is applied to emails you need to consistently refer back to in the future for example industry reports or a new reimbursement process for travel expenses all other types of emails can be archived now that everything is set up let's jump into a

realistic workflow when you open up Outlook first thing in the morning you actually want to start from the bottom and work your way up the first email is a companywide announcement I read it there's no action I need to take on my side so I press e to Archive notice that Outlook jumped automatically to the next more recent unread email and this is because we had the jump to previous conversation option enabled from before right uh the naming is counterintuitive I don't know why Microsoft does this but it works this next email is the amazing

productivity newsletter that everyone can seem to shut up about uh this has been pre- categorized uh so the newsletter tag has been applied when the email hits my inbox right so after I read it I can press e to Archive again and I can still quickly access it when I click on the newsletter category Pro tip you can click on the keyboard shortcut gni to go back to the main inbox from anywhere within Outlook this next email is the uh reservation confirmation from Marriott and it's been pre- categorized with the trips category I can safely

archive this press e knowing that if I need to refer to it I can just click on the trips category this next email is an interesting one because Mr Nutella is asking me for something I don't have but I'm ultimately held responsible because I need to reply right so I'm going to press F to forward this email to ask my colleague for help after sending the email I'm going to categorize this as Waiting by pressing C start typing waiting enter and then press e to Archive The Waiting label literally means I will chase these colleagues

every single day until they give me what I need this next email I've just been cced on and what seems to be a dick measuring contest between two CEOs with ultra high egos so I'm just going to press e to Archive nothing needed from me okay for this one I actually need to do some work it's a request from Elon now it's important to remember the two-minute rule by David Allen if action can be taken in 2 minutes or left I should just take care of it right away but this research request uh is going

to clearly take more than 2 minutes so I'm going to press C to categorize follow up press enter and then press e to Archive so I can come back to this later second last email is an announcement on the new travel expense process I currently do not need to expense anything but I know I will at some point so I'm just going to categorizes at as read through so I can refer to it in the future see read through press enter and archive this last email is a curveball because although it looks like a follow-up

email I have to prepare a presentation right the due date is actually in the month and since we don't want this email sitting in the follow-up category for that long we can actually just press B to snooze this email to to a date uh one week before the due date right so we can follow up then now that all the emails from the main inbox are categorized and archived I can focus my time on taking action on followup emails and chasing people down for waiting emails and going through the rest of the categories as needed

once a tag is no longer applicable for example my colleague replied with information I needed I can First Press e to make sure it's archived and press C start typing waiting and press enter to uncategorize it so the email disappears from The Waiting label it's important to note that archive does not mean deleted you can always find archived emails in the archive folder down here or you can search for archived emils in the search bar up top all right although my example is realistic it's also oversimplified so for you to adopt inbox zero I recommend

first going through the last four weeks of emails then either tagging those emails with an action category or archiving them directly and from Tomorrow onwards As Long as You Follow the workflow I went through just now you will always have an extremely organized inbox this leads me to the biggest drawback of inbox zero for Outlook and it really doesn't make sense in Gmail no matter how many emails you have you can select all and archive so all the emails disappear from the main inbox and shift to the right allowing you to achieve true inbox zero

in Outlook if you have relatively few emails you can select all emails in your inbox like so and archive by clicking move to Archive folder but I found out if you have a lot of emails I only have 4,000 in this inbox Outlook will not let you archive in bulk if you're in this unlucky group you have two options you can either live with previous emails in your inbox or you can spend like an hour holding down shift and bulk selecting emails like this and then archiving them one batch at a time like Microsoft why

though second drawback since Outlook doesn't have a multiple inbox view you just have to build a habit of clicking through the ACT categories instead of being able to just scan down like you would in Gmail third and this is the weirdest one there's no way for us to view categories in the main inbox without favoring them for example if I go to newsletter and I unfavored it there's actually nowhere else I can go to see all my newsletters in one place I would have to add this back as a favorite Microsoft tries to get around

this limitation with the Fest feature but it doesn't work well because an email cannot exist in both the main inbox and a folder at the same time time and the whole point of pre categories is to see the email land in your main inbox acknowledge it then archive it if you still want to use folders my recommendation is to create a folder for each pre category you have so the next time a pre- categorized email lands in your main inbox you read it right and then you press V which stands for move and start typing

in newsletter the folder press enter and now you can see all your newsletters in one place this adds an extra step to the workflow but at least this allows you to unfavorite all the other categories and allows you to have a really clean sidebar last drawback within Gmail when you write a new email you can actually apply a label SL category from the composed window directly in Outlook when you write a new email and let's say you want to apply the waiting category you actually have to send the email then go to the send items

folder then press C to start applying the category from there congrats Outlook users you can now use the box workflow and as the next step make sure to check out the top eight productivity tips for the workplace see you on the next video in the meantime have a great one