This category is for all of the actions that help you grow as a person. This category will help you think strategically and keep you from getting distracted by unimportant urgent tasks. The Purpose and Goals category is the most important category and it is reserved for the most important actions. Here is a versatile category structure that works for a variety of workflows. That way, as we start to work through our tasks, we can follow the order we set when we created our categories. When we create categories, we’re going to number them so they arrange themselves in order of priority. Since we’re going to use categories for actionable emails we need to create different categories for different kinds of actions. To modify your categories or add more colors to Outlook Categories, go to All Categories. If you’ve never used categories before, then the defaults will be named after different colors. To add a category to an email, select an email, right-click and go to categorize. In order to group emails that need similar action together, we’re going to use categories.

It’s more efficient than multitasking and switching back and forth between different kinds of tasks. Batching refers to the process of grouping similar tasks together. This prevents us from taking advantage of one an important productivity strategy, batching. The downside is that your inbox doesn’t allow you to prioritize and organize your tasks as well as other tools. Your email inbox works the same way, it’s supposed to be for receiving, yet a lot of people keep emails in their inbox to remind them to do something. Here’s why: you don’t keep your to-do list and your filing cabinet in your mailbox right? Your mailbox is for receiving, your filing cabinet is for storing important papers for later and your to-do list is for getting things done. But why would we want to do that? Why not just flag emails and use that as a to-do list? We need a different approach to organize emails that need us to take action. In the last article, we created a folder structure to organize the emails we need to keep for future reference. In this article, you’ll learn how to use color categories in Outlook to organize your to-do list and actionable emails.

Outlook for mac get startted