The problem with keeping email in one large archive is finding specific messages again. So, people create one extra folder, and then two, and then loads! Use these techniques instead of folders to organize your archive.
How (and Why) to Tag Your Messages
We recommend just archiving your email. It’s the best way to organize it. Don’t waste time moving messages into folders in your email client—put everything in one archive folder. For example, in Gmail, just click the Archive button.
But, if you’ve got no folders, how do you arrange your messages for easy retrieval? The answer is simple: tagging.
The single biggest benefit of using tags instead of folders is that you’re not forced to pigeonhole an email into just one folder. With tagging, you no longer have to decide if that mail about a vendor issue on a client project goes in the vendor folder, client folder, project folder, or lessons learned folder. You just add the appropriate tags to the email, and then you can easily find it again, whether you want to find emails related to that vendor, client, or so on.
If you’re moving from a folder-based system to a single archive, tagging is the key to being able to find things afterward. You can tag in bulk, so if you have a folder for a client, you can tag every item in there with the name of that client before moving it into your archive. This way, you can be sure it’s easy to find again.
Best of all, tagging is simple in (almost) every modern email app. Even if you end up keeping folders, tagging is so useful that we recommend doing it anyway.
Categorizing in Outlook
In Outlook, tagging is called “categorizing.” You can create as many categories as you want, assign them colors, and then apply them to anything in Outlook—emails, calendar events, tasks, notes, and even contacts. This not only makes it easy to search but also highlights your Outlook contents with a color. For example, if you create a category for a project and give it a specific color—let’s say purple—you can tag every related item with that category. Without reading anything, you’ll know that every purple email, calendar event, task, note, or contact is associated with that project. Categories haven’t come to the Outlook mobile app yet, so you’ll have to do your categorizing in the client or the web app.
When categorizing your mail, you can categorize everything in a single folder by selecting all the email (using the Ctrl+A keyboard shortcut), and then selecting your category—or categories—of choice. You can even change your Archive folder view so that it groups mail by categories, which will mimic a folder structure. Then you get the benefit of tagging and the benefit of a folder view.
Labeling in Gmail
In Gmail, tagging is called “labeling,” and it works in both the web and mobile apps. Like in Outlook, you can create as many labels as you want (sort of—there’s a limit of 5,000, after which Google says you might experience performance problems, but few people ever do) and assign them colors. You can also create filters to label emails automatically based on whatever criteria you want.
