- [Narrator] I have a post office box.
I go in every few days to pick up my mail
and if I simply took all of that mail that I received
and brought it home and kept it forever,
I would soon be deluged with mail
because of the amount of mail that I receive.
So none of us tend to keep all the mail we get.
We tend to read a piece of mail
and do something with it or throw it away.
Some of the mail I get, I don't even read.
I look at the envelope and I know I'm not interested
or that it represents something that I already know.
So you and I tend to keep for posterity
only a small percentage of the physical mail
that we receive.
Most of the mail that we get
ends up recycled or in the trash.
And once we're done with it, we're done.
That small number of things we keep might be items
that we put in a safety deposit box or a vault,
like a vehicle title or love letters or birthday wishes,
things that we might hang
on a bulletin board or keep in a special location.
But if we were simply to look
at the location where we review mail in our homes,
we wouldn't find that it was full of last year's mail
and the year before and the year before that
because most of that has been thrown away.
I encourage you to treat your Outlook inbox exactly
the same way that you treat physical mail.
If you're not a hoarder in your personal life,
don't be one in your work life with your inbox.
Actually look at your emails
and unless your company policies require you
to keep every email you receive,
be willing to say about at least some items,
"I'm done with this and I don't need it anymore,"
or, "I'm done with this and I need to save it."
But remember that everything you want to save
doesn't have to live here in our inbox.
Our inbox is the place where new mail is delivered
and space here is precious.
Users who keep all of their read emails here
in their inbox don't do themselves a service
because you take a hit then in terms of performance
when you're searching for things.
And it also means that it's harder
for you to focus on your inbox.
So let's talk about how we get rid of messages
when we no longer want them.
If I'm looking at a message, for example,
this message, and I no longer want it,
there's a little trash can right here
and I just click that icon and it is gone.
I'm going to scroll down to another email
I want to get rid of about licenses.
I have read this so I can mark it as read if I want to,
which is really easy to do.
I can right-click and choose mark as read so it shows
as unread, but now I don't want it in my inbox.
What can I do?
Well, I'm actually required to keep license changes
so I'm going to right-click on my inbox, new sub-folder,
and I'm going to name this licenses.
That's part of my job, and I'm going to take that message
and I'm going to drag it to licenses.
Either way, it's no longer in my inbox,
which is super sweet.
Remember that your inbox space is important to you.
Be willing to delete things that you no longer need to read,
that you are done with.
And if there are items that you do need to retain,
create a folder for them and get them out of your inbox.