Outlook Categories Increase Firm Productivity

If your like me, you get a ton of email each day. I have found that an easy way to organize my email within Outlook is through the utilization of color categories. With categories I can quickly see my follow up emails based on the color, and I can even create rules having to do with categories. For example, you can make a rule stating that any email coming from a certain address gets a purple color code.

Setting up categories is easy. In Outlook 2013, 2016 on the top bar under the Home tab, look for Tags and then Categorize. Click Categorize and then click All Categories. From this window you will be able to customize your color categories and even name them. I find that deleting the categories I don’t need saves time when I am categorizing my email. Once you are done customizing you should be able to right-click an email, scroll down to Categorize and hit the category that relates to the email.

I generally have a Follow Up category as well as a Potential Client category. Creating categories for important emails having to do with sales and support helps keep me stay on top of potential business and high priority emails. It really does increase productivity and helps stop work from falling between the cracks.