In this tutorial, Randy Dean, the "Email Sanity Expert," walks viewers through a practical workflow for managing Microsoft Outlook email so that the inbox stays clean and searchable. He begins by emphasizing the need for clear, descriptive subject lines—both when sending and receiving emails—to make future searches easier. He then introduces Outlook's built‑in Categories (which he prefers to call "labels"), showing how to rename default color categories, create new ones, and apply multiple labels to a single message. Dean demonstrates how to add custom keywords directly into an email's subject line after it has been received (and also for sent items), stressing the importance of saving changes and positioning keywords at the end of the subject when using Conversation View. He walks through Outlook's powerful search interface, covering searches by sender, recipient, subject, body, attachment, category, and scope (current folder, subfolders, all mailboxes, all Outlook items). He advises using precise search criteria to speed results and encourages users to experiment with additional search fields. Dean then connects these tools to folder architecture, arguing that with effective labeling and keywording, a complex hierarchy of nested folders is often unnecessary; instead, a few top‑level project/client folders plus a generic “Search Here” folder can suffice, relying on search to locate items. He adds a quick tip on sorting columns (by name, subject, date, size) to group related messages for bulk actions. Finally, he explains the psychological cost of leaving dealt‑with emails in the inbox, citing research that such habits waste time and equate to “insanity,” and urges viewers to move processed emails out of the inbox confidently using the tools demonstrated. The video concludes with a call to action, offering additional resources via his website and email.
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Alright, hi everybody, Randy Dean, Email Sanity Expert here. And today I wanted to make a video about one of those things I get asked all the time when I'm out on the road. And the thing I get asked is, Randy, how do you get an inbox that looks like that and consistently looks like that? And obviously I teach a whole program on how you can tame your email beast. I have the related ebook that's now out. On Amazon, recently rewritten. And, but the interesting thing about this, I always tell people, is just because it looks like that, it doesn't mean I got all the work done. But it means that once I either handle an email, meaning I got done what needed to do, or I put it on my task list or my calendar, I don't leave it in my inbox anymore. I either delete it if I no longer need it, but most of my emails I actually do keep for later reference. Somewhere in my folder system. But now what's interesting is I've heard a lot of people that have told me, Randy Dean, I don't like to put my emails sometimes in my folders because I'm frankly somewhat afraid I'm not going to be able to find that email later when I need it. But did you know that Microsoft Outlook has built in a ton of features to give you the confidence to put your emails away when you are done with them for now. And if you know about these features and tools, you can find your emails, which means you don't need to leave them in your inbox causing a lot of unnecessary distraction and rework. Alright, so let's talk about some of the options that can allow you to do that. So first thing I want to just give you a tip on is remember Part of what's going to make this work is search. Maybe the first thing you need to start doing is writing some better subject lines and asking the people that send you emails to write better subject lines too. And now here's the thing. You send out an email says, here you go. Good luck finding that email later. It's too vague. What I'm talking about is give your emails when you're writing your emails. More descriptive subject lines, and for part of the reason is so that you can search and find them later. Include things like the project name or the client or the vendor or your coworker's name if you know they're going to be involved with it. You know, the name of the event or the activity it's related to. Get that kind of stuff up in your subject lines, and that's going to help you find it later. But you know what else it's going to be nice for? The person getting the email who now has some sort of idea about what it is they're about to get into when they open that email. So it, it's really helpful all the way around. And not only is it going to help you find emails that you have sent, but if you can get other people to write better subject lines, it will help you with receiving them. Now hold that thought though, because I know a lot of people out there are writing truly lousy, very vague non-descriptive subject line. So I've got a tip for you coming up in this video, so keep watching. But that'll help a lot right there. Now the next thing I want you to do is go in and set up your categories in Microsoft Outlook. Now maybe you haven't noticed these things. These are super handy in all of the functions. And by the way, I've actually made a really deep dive video for my channel a while ago. It's actually been one of my more popular videos. Which is how you can use the categories in Outlook in all 5 of the major functions, not just email, but also calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes. It's a really useful tool, but I want to specifically talk for a minute about how these things can be so useful for giving you the confidence to file your emails. And let me show you why. Let's pop out here. And I don't know if you've even noticed it. Watch this. If I right-click on the email, you will see right here categories. They also have at the top a thing called tags. And under tags, notice that you can mark them read or unread. I have some videos about why you do not want to do unreads or flags. Turn your emails into task or calendar. Video about that in the comments too. But this is what I want you to see are these things called categories. And you get to them under this little tags. Icon, or you can also get to them by simply right-clicking on the email to get to them. And let me give you a different word for these things. Don't call them categories, call them labels. I think labels makes it so much easier for people to understand what they actually are and how you can use them. And as you can see, I've set up a whole slew of these labels. Now, how do you set up your category— categories? Simply come down here to All Categories. And what I want you to do then is the first time you open up, there's going to be a few of them here and they're actually going to say the words red category, green category, blue category, tan category. They'll literally have words like that next to the color code. And there won't be as many as you see here on my screen. It'll be a small list. But you can click on any one of these and then come over here and hit the word rename. And now you could rename. It'll highlight it so you can type over what was previously there, and now you can create labels. And to quickly show you how I got here again, because I did that a little bit fast, let's show you that again. I did a right-click. I came down to Categories. I came to All Categories. It brought up my Category Wizard box. I now click on one of the categories or color codes that's there. And I hit the word rename, which then turns it to where I can type something over what was existing and already there for that color code. And by the way, once you run out of colors, all you have to do is hit the word new and it will give you a new category and will give you an auto-assigned color that probably is different from any of the other colors you already have. And, and you can have a lot of these, these categories, but remember, I call them Labels. And let's talk a little bit about the different kinds of labels you can have. You can have labels for your key primary projects, the subprojects within the projects. If they're, if it's a really extensive large project, you could have labels for your clients or customers, your activities and events, your vendors and your contractors, maybe even some personal labels for like, you know, the kids' soccer or household or whatever. If you're doing that kind of work in your Outlook. But the key thing is, by setting up a set of these labels that are pretty self-explanatory to you and make sense to you, you can now give yourself the opportunity to add these labels to your emails. But here's what's really cool about setting up the categories. Let me show you something. Once you have them set up, like, let's take this email right here. I can right-click, come to Categories, and notice what I can do. I could make it Client Prospect, but I could also categorize it as Household, and I could categorize it as Streaming Programs. And what's interesting about the way that this works, you can add multiple labels to the same email. So now let's think this through. If you have an email that has labels for the client or the project or the coworker or the activity or event or the vendor, and you've got all those labels on here. Now you've got several ways to search for that email and find it later. Because yes, one of the things you can search if you click on the search bar at the top is by category. See, if I click over here to the side, I can click by category, or the other option is I can hit this little drop window right here, which, which almost looks like the Gmail filtering tool. I'm not sure who copied who on this one. I think maybe Gmail might have copied Outlook on this one. But notice that one of the options right here is categories, and you can search by label. And so knowing that you can search by the labels you've created either here Or like I said, notice the old search tools in the background. You can get to those by simply clicking over here off to the side or collapsing that. Watch once again, let me do this one more time. I'll click on search and there's the old set of tools because I haven't done the drop caret up here, but I can search by category. Now we're going to come back and talk a little bit more about that in a minute. But by setting up labels, if you label these before you put them in a folder, You can search for that email in several different ways. And the problem that a lot of people run into is they don't even know what folder they should put it into because it's a, it's touching 5 or 6 things. But if you've set up your categories, you could just take that email, put it in the folder that makes most sense to you right now, and know that if you, you go back later to look for it and find it and it's not where you thought you put it, well, you can search by label. And find it. Now related to that though, the other thing that you can do is keyword those emails. Now when I say keyword, here's what I mean, and a lot of people don't know you can do this with an email in Outlook. Let's go into this one right here. See the one I said that's called Squirrel? Let me show you something sort of fun about this. You can actually open up an email that somebody has sent to you. Okay, they sent it to me. It's in my inbox. And now watch, I opened it and now I can come up here to the subject line. And if I click right up here into the subject line on this open email, there we go. I can type in Client A, Project B, Vendor C. Type that in, into a subject line that somebody else wrote to me that did not have that information. Now, before I close it though, I have to come up here and hit save. That's the critical piece. You have to hit save before you hit close. Because now look, it changed the subject line. So it's now got these keywords. Now, a little watch out for this. This is great. That means I can search by word. And you can take a look here. If I do my drop menu like I did before, search by from, or if it's in the body, or if it's in the subject. Right here's where I could do the searches in subject to be able to go find the emails that have the appropriate keywords in them. So see, now not only do I have labels that I can tag my emails with, but I can also put keywords in the subject lines of those same emails, even if they didn't have the keywords when they were originally sent to me. And oh yes, by the way, you can go into your own Sent folder and click on emails that you've sent. And after you've sent them, you can open them and change the subject lines a bit more too, to give them those keywords also if you're doing search out of your Sent folder. Wow, lot. But think this through. One other little thing to think about though. If you're using Conversation View, what you might want to do is do this. I'm gonna grab that, do a Ctrl+X. Now I'm gonna come back onto this and I'm going to do a Ctrl+V. All I did was move this to the back. Why? Because when you use conversation view to search for your emails, it's based on the characters in the subject line. And if you put those new words in front of the original subject line, It's probably not going to pick it up. Like I said, get it set up so you've got both labels and possibly keywords on those emails. That will give you even more confidence to put them away because you know you have the ability to search that email as you need it. Do I want to save the change? See, it noticed that I made this change, so I'm going to say yes. And you'll see that moved the items here to the end. That's option number 2. So remember, option 1, create labels, label your emails. Option number 2, add keywords to your emails before you file them and/or possibly add keywords to items in your Sent folder to make it easier to find your stuff there also. Just remember, if you've got that conversation view that you like to use, move the keywords to the end of the subject line, not up front. That's the second option. Now, third option is to learn how to use your search. And notice that I've already shown it to you a little bit, but you can search by name of the person sending it to you or who you sent it to. You can search by words in the subject line. You can search containing words in the body. You can search by categories, meaning labels we've shown you. You can search in current folder, subfolder, all folders, all mailbox, and even all Outlook items. Now, of course, the broader the search you do, either more open by word or by location, the longer it will take for the search to run. The more specific you can get, the faster you are going to get your results and the more precise your results will be. So that's part of the reason why you want to have good labels and maybe use some keywords, because then it'll be easier to find your stuff. However, let's go take a look at this again. Let's go look at the search options a little bit more. So once again, you just click on search. It now has some different dropdowns, but notice this. If I come up here and hit my drop arrow, I can search in the current mailbox. I can search by whether it has attachments. I can search by whether the attachment has a keyword. I can search by categories, meaning labels. And if I click this open, I can see all of the labels I can search by. I can search by who it was from or to. If you're doing it in the, in the Send folder, it'll actually probably say to, not from. By the words in the body copy, by when you maybe received it, or in the Sent folder, it'll be when you sent it, what was in the subject line, etc. And you can even add more options down here. I'm not going to go too deep into that, but play around with this when you get it set up, because maybe you can add in some additional field options that would be very relevant to your work. Now, like I said, if I collapse this and I click on Search. Some of you may remember this old search menu. These are the same tools. And notice that some of these tools give you the option to search all mailboxes, current mailbox, current folder, all subfolders. And there's that crazy all Outlook items. You can search everything. But the key point is learn how to use these tools because once you learn how to use them, it's going to make it work better. And notice, you know, from and subject attachments by label, Who'd you send it to? Is it an unread message? Did you flag it? Hopefully you're not doing unreads and flags because that's how you're looking at your email over and over again. You can even look at your recent searches to see if it's there. And, and maybe if you got some stuff that's still in your deleted folder, you could include your deleted items. So learn your search tool, play with your search tool, make it your friend. Because once you know you have confidence that you've labeled the emails, you know what's in the emails, you put keywords in the emails, and you know how to use your search tool, you can find your emails, which means you don't need to leave them in your inbox. Now, timeout. Do you see why writing better subject lines right up front might help you immensely? Because so much of this is going to be related to being able to find those emails better. Now, coming back to this, now you're probably saying, well, Randy, okay, with all of this, why haven't you talked about the file system? Well, the reason I haven't talked about the file system yet is because everything I just showed you leads in to building your file system. And it might change how you build your file system according to knowing about these tools, especially Categories. Keywords and what you can do with search. What I mean by it is this, you know, a lot of people that have been brought up in Outlook for many, many years, you've been using it for like a decade or more, there's a good chance that you have folders and in some place you have folders inside of folders and in some place you have folders inside of folders inside of folders for every project, subproject, project, etc., down to a level of granularity That actually might be counterproductive because if you've got all these drop folders, you might have so much complexity in your folder structure that it's hard to find stuff and it takes you a long time to put stuff away. Hmm. But if you know that you can search by label, meaning category, you can search by keyword or code word as well as you can broaden your searches and do word-specific searches, broader folders, etc. Maybe you don't need so many folders. Now I actually did another video I'll put in the comments below, which is the 3 different philosophies for file and folder management. And sort of my philosophy is maybe we would do better by having more, a few more main level project client customer vendor folders, you know, sort of your big stuff folders. You have a few of those, the things that you are working on all the time that are the most important stuff in whatever your work is. And then maybe you have one or two generic folders where you put everything else. You know, you could even name the folder Search for this, Search Here. Just make a folder called Search Here. For everything else and put everything that doesn't fit one of those major folders in that alternate generic folder and then use search to find your stuff. Now, by the way, there's one other little thing that not a lot of people know about. Make this the final little tip. Did you know, and I'm not going to go into my sent folder to show you this because there might be like client information and things like that in there. But I can do it right here. Let me show you something. Did you know that you can actually sort by name? So if I hit from, it'll do by Randy Dean. But if I had other emails in here, it would sort it in, sort it in alpha order or reverse alpha order depending on how many times I click this. I can also search it by subject. Now watch what happens when I click on the subject at the top. It switched the order. See, it was T and then S. Now it's S and then T. Alpha order. But if I hit it again, it'll switch it back. You can also search it by date created, and you can do it from newest to oldest or oldest to newest, and you can also do it by date received, and you can also do it by size. Now the reason I'm sharing this is that if you know you can click on these top column headers either in your inbox or any of your subfolders, or especially your sent folder, That gives you yet another way you might be able to find that email more quickly, especially like, let's say if you wanted to find like all the emails from Sally on your team, you could go find an email that was sent to Sally in your Sent folder, click on that email because it says, you know, to Sally, and then click the top, and then you're going to get all the ones that have Sally and the two feel great next to each other. Go play with that. Try it. Send folder, or if your inbox is a big cluttered messy mess, that might be a way to save you some time putting some away too, because you could grab all those ones that were from Sally as one big group, move them all into your client folder for Sally. Options. Having this capability to understand these tools will give you the confidence to put your stuff away. And here's why is it so important you put your stuff away, Randy Dean. Science has shown that the vast majority of people that leave an email in their inbox that they have already dealt with, they either did what they needed to do or became part of their task list or their calendar, will open that email again later because they can't remember if they dealt with it or not. And if you're doing that— by which, by the way, do you know the definition of insanity? If you're doing that, that's a pure form waste of time and a little bit crazy, frankly. You got to get those emails out of your inbox once you know you've dealt with them and you've done what you needed to do with them for now. Get them into those folders but know your tools so you know you can have the confidence to find them later if you need to. All right. I hope you found this one helpful. I mean, it's a bit of a longer video, but let's finish this thing up. I just want to say thank you for your time. Let's jump down here to the end and yeah, there we go. Thanks for your time. Once again, I'm Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert. And if you'd like to learn a little bit more about me, go down to my website, randaldean.com. You can also send me an email if you'd like to get some bonus PDF tip sheets with tips and even video links on time management, email management, Outlook usage, Google usage, smartphone, tablet usage, and more. So send me that email, Randy@randydean.com, and just put YouTube PDF in the subject line. And of course, if you like these videos, you find them useful, please like, please subscribe, please share the video with other people who you think might find it useful also. And with that, I'm going to say thank you very much. We are done. Bye now.
