Create Inbox folders

- [Gini] If the Inbox is the only folder that you use to work with incoming email, you'll have a mix of items in your Inbox. First, you'll have messages that are in process, messages that you've read but only skimmed. Messages that you've read but you haven't actually done any work with them yet. You may also have messages that you're done with. Your work with this message is complete, and there it is in your Inbox because you can't delete it. Perhaps because there's a retention policy, or perhaps because you just have really good sense and you know that some of the messages that you're done with still need to hang around for a while just in case. And then of course you have new incoming messages sliding into this mix of items that are in process and items that are completed. One strategy for handling messages in your Inbox is simply to separate these things. To be able to say here are the messages that I'm working on, here are the messages I've dealt with, and to save your Inbox for the new incoming messages. The simplest system that I have ever seen for organizing one's Inbox is a colleague of mine Mike, who works in IT at a community college. He does a lot of work in direct support so he'll get a request to set up an email folder, or to create a new account, or perhaps to create an application. Most of Mike's requests are to do something specific. So, Mike created two folders in his Inbox to manage his work. The first is a folder called To do. And Mike uses this folder to store those items that are in process. And then he has another folder simply called Ta da, where he places items that are completed but he still needs to track. Now I want a few more folders than this. I actually like folders for specific projects. Right now in my Inbox I'd like to create a folder for a staff survey initiative that I'm receiving a lot of emails regarding, and I would like to also create a folder for an onboarding project. Let's go do that. To create a folder, first make sure you are in the folder you would like to contain the folder you're going to create. In my Inbox I want to create a new folder. And there are different ways that I can do this, but the easiest way is simply to right click and choose New Folder. I have a text box to enter a folder name, and this is going to be Staff Survey. Now, I want to create another folder for the onboarding project. Note though which folder is selected, Staff Survey. If I create the Onboarding Project folder right now, it will be a subfolder of Staff Survey. It's really not, it's up here. So I want to click back in my Inbox, right click again, choose New Folder, and choose Onboarding Project. And that's how I create my folders. I can also rearrange my folders using drag and drop. They don't have to be in the order I created them or in alphabetical order, although I actually like alphabetical order by and large within my Inbox. Now that I've created these folders, I'll work with them for a while and then I know right now I'm going to learn something, which is the onboarding project isn't the only project I'll ever work on. And there's a benefit to keeping all of my projects together, all of my meeting groups together, so I'd like to change my folder structure so it looks more like this. I want to create a new folder for projects and place the Onboarding Project folder in that Projects folder. And then the next project will get its own folder and projects and so on. I might have 25 projects, I don't want them all to be at the top level of my Inbox so I will nest those Project folders within the folder that's called Projects. Let's see how we're going to do that. Returning here to my Inbox, the new folder that I want to create is going to be called Projects. And now I'm going to drag the folder for Onboarding Project and drop it on the Projects folder. I'll be prompted, are you sure you want to move it inside the folder Projects? Yes. Some language around the relationship of these folders, the Inbox has two child folders right now, Projects and Staff Survey. For both Projects and Staff Survey, we could refer to the Inbox as their parent folder. We could also say that Projects and Staff Survey are subfolders within the Inbox, and that Onboarding Project is a subfolder of the Projects folder. Obviously we'll also need to move items to these folders, and we'll talk more about that in a bit.