GTD with more than one account at Outlook

[Felipe Costa Gualberto]

Considering you use the 4 folders in Outlook (ie. Inbox, @Action, @Folloup, @Archive), how do you manage more than one Outlook account?

In my case, I have three different accounts: one personal, other with part-time consulting and my site and other from my work. All three have important messages.

It is unnecessary to say that I should not create 4 folders for each Outlook account. It wouldn't be a bad idea if Outlook supported creating a Search Folder that search through more than one account, but it doesn't support in the moment.

 

[Gardener]

Well, in my case, I don't use those folders. Using messages as actions has never worked for me--so often one message can have several actions, one action can be addressed with several messages, and so on. I enter my actions elsewhere, and if an email is useful reference material for that action, I'll add a note to the action that helps me identify the email. Then absolutely all emails go into Archive--well, unless they're deleted.

 

[Folke]

I agree with Gardener. I too find the relationship between message and action to be nowhere near one-to-one. And message titles are seldom phrased as next actions. Better to treat the mail as reference and have a separate action list.

 

[bcmyers2112]

Actually, some versions of Outlook allow you to set up multiple accounts. They'd be set up in entirely different folder structures, though, so you'd still need to create search folders if you wanted to see actionable emails from all three accounts in one folder, for example.

Also it may not be a good idea to use your work-provided Outlook client to check personal email. Any technology provided by your employer is company property and when using it you have no right to privacy.

Depending on what type of email accounts you're using, another solution may be to set them all up on a mobile device like an iPhone. There are some email apps available for iOS that make it easy to turn emails from multiple accounts into easily managed tasks. I would guess there are also similar apps for use on Droid devices.

If that doesn't work, consider the slightly less high-tech solution suggested by Folke and Gardener -- just manually input the relevant actions into your lists and move the email into whatever folder seems appropriate (@Actions or a project or reference folder). The nice thing about lower-tech solutions is that they're easy to implement.