Email management
Categories & colour coding best practice
Categorising your email and calendar can help you sort, find and action messages and events related to a project, task, or person.
To add a category to an email select the Home tab.
In the Tags group, select Categorize.
Microsoft recommends the following categories to help you stay organised.
Note: Using the @ symbol makes the categories stand out in your category list. Marking @ before certain categories helps to keep these categories at the top of your category list and reminds you of where you should be when you are performing this task (for example, @Phone is "at the phone").
Each of your direct reports and your manager for items that you want to review the next time you meet (for example, a category named 1:1 Manager).
Each of the major locations or types of activities that you do, so that you can perform bulk actions (a useful part of managing your tasks), for example:
@Commute for tasks that you can do on the way home from work.
@Email for tasks that involve email messages, meetings, or any other aspect of Outlook.
@Home for tasks that you can do only at home.
@Meeting for items that you need in order to prepare for a meeting.
@Offline for tasks that take you away from the computer, such as making a copy of a document.
@Online for tasks that you can accomplish only online or through a Web browser.
@Phone for calls you have to make or receive.
@Read for tasks that involve just reading — not responding. This category is useful for long messages or attachments that you need to read but can’t get to right away.
@Waiting for messages or tasks for which you are awaiting a response, but there is no explicit next action for you.
@Project for each important topic or project so that you can easily find messages on a given topic. — especially if there is no word in the body or subject of the message that would make it appear in a search.
@Follow-up Important items that must be done today and can’t roll over to another day.
@Events and @Birthday for annual leave, holidays, birthdays and special events.
Note: Be very careful about categorising your outgoing messages — your recipients might be able to see your categories.
Colour coding your categories for easy viewing.
Use colour groups to help you easily find, view and action what you need to do. Here are some sample ideas to help you get started.
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