LeanMail Prioritize

This is, by far, the favorite work-around of most Outlook users. The most obvious problem with this method is that you are basically lying to yourself when you mark a mail as being unread. You read it! But you mark it as unread because it changes the text to bold so that you can easily identify it as important. The challenge arises when you’re not sure if you marked it as unread or if you really never read the unread-marked mail causing you to re-read a lot of read mails that you marked unread even though you read them. You know that “Oh yeah, now I remember” feeling? I think you get the point. What is especially interesting about this method is that so many people use it because, even with the myriad of bells and whistles in Outlook, there has sadly been no real alternative.

By default, the Outlook inbox is sorted by your most recent mails on top. This enables you to quickly access those mails first. The challenge with this way of working is that it is counter intuitive. If you were to prioritize your mails by when you received them, wouldn’t you want to address the oldest mails that have been waiting longest before those that have just arrived? Yes, you can reprogram Outlook to reverse the order or you can simply click on the field to reverse the order to oldest on top – but you don’t for two reasons: 1) it’s an extra step that we don’t get into the habit of doing and more accurately 2) your inbox is probably so full of a mix of completed, uncompleted mails, and mails that should be deleted or archived that sorting in reverse order will only serve to ensure that you miss important new arrivals!

And just to pour a bit more salt on that wound, urgency, as we will learn later on, is not synonymous with importance. So using the Received column won’t work no matter what you do – but I guess you’ve already come to that conclusion, which is why you’re here today.

This method would makes a lot of sense if it weren’t for three major issues: 1) you often get so caught up in the heat of battle that you forget about the folder and get one of those mini-heart attacks when you come upon it one day; 2) it becomes a method for work avoidance and procrastination; and 3) you are inconsistent and don’t trust that all the mails you need to do are actually in the to-do folder. Am I right or what?

Flagging mails for various dates is what Outlook actually recommends. again, this is not a prioritization method but a way of deciding urgency, which is helpful, but when you have thirty-seven mails due on Friday you still need a way of determining which are the ones you really need to action and which of them can wait.

On the fly prioritization is for renegade users who really believe that they don’t need a systematic way of prioritizing because they can remember which ones are the most important ones. This works excellently and is highly recommended for those with a photographic memory. For others who can’t accurately remember which mails should be actioned (and which ones can wait) on particular dates and in which order of priority, we need a tool.

Now that you know why we need to prioritize and what the current challenges are, let’s get and understanding of how LeanMail solves these challenges.