You have all the advantages of a single folder, and all the advantages of a multi-folder system. Then, when you need to search for them you can group them by category as shown in the image above-it’s similar to having a set of folders all in one folder. Then just drag all mail you are done with to the single folder.Īs I just mentioned above, once you apply categories to e-mail, you can file them in a single folder (I call it the Processed Mail folder). Outlook rules for auto-filing incoming mail work much better when filing to categories than when filing to folders because they leave the e-mail in the Inbox where you can still read it.Categories can be grouped in your single-folder filing system, which makes visual searching easy (more on that below).The e-mail shows up in each category group without taking additional space. You can apply more than one category to an e-mail, so you don’t waste time trying to decide which folder to put it in.Here are the reasons why filing with Outlook Categories is so much faster than using multiple topic-named folders: Why Categories Save Tons of Time Compared to Topic-Named Folders Best of all, they save a huge amount of time when compared to using topic-named folders. Categories take a little time to learn at first, but after that they are very easy to use. You may know that I highly recommend using Outlook Categories instead of using multiple Outlook folders when filing mail.

Using outlook for task management