hi welcome in the following videos i will be demonstrating some of our recommended best practices for using the stack method effectively and easily we want to help alleviate the stress associated with email and get your inbox to zero it's important to note that these are recommendations they're not hard and fast rules we want the process to be comfortable and effortless to maintain so please feel free to customize it to fit you the stack method is designed to give you back more of your time and is completely non-destructive you won't lose any important emails we promise happy stacking so we're in outlook for pc and we're going to talk about how to create your action folders now you'll notice here on the left that i have nested them all under the inbox and the reason that we do that is so if i collapse it i don't have to look at those folders all the time and it creates an incredibly streamlined non-cluttered appearance but for now i'm going to uncollapse them and you'll notice that we've given them short action-oriented names reply do meet remind forward review and so on you'll also notice that i put the numbers right next to the actual name of the folder and the reason that we do that is so that this is the order that i would like to prioritize my workflow and by putting the number to the left of the actual name it keeps it floated in the order that i like to work i would rather reply to somebody before i do something or schedule meetings so you're going to want to customize this to suit you best you may want to move this around and the best way to create these folders is to right click on the inbox go to new folder and then you can go ahead and type in the name of the folder again pick short action-oriented names you probably noticed earlier when we were talking about creating our action folders that there was also a folder at the bottom called seven when and you'll see that we did go ahead and continue the sequence of numbers but the when folder does work a little bit differently sometimes you'll need access to a folder that contains items you're actively working on for example if you're creating a presentation we're calling these active folders and in email this is where the when folder would come in i would nest all folders for active projects here so for example if i uncollapse this you'll see that i've nested a few folders under here that are things i'm currently working on so a good example is working on project x i can go ahead and set that up in my email so every time i see an email come in that relates to working on project x it goes right into project x folder and we can move it and i can even move it that way as well using keyboard shortcuts which we'll talk about in a moment but that way when you go to sit down and work on project x everything you could possibly need is all in that folder ready to go and when you're done with it say for example traveling september 2021 already happened you can go ahead and archive that folder okay here we go this is going to be the stacking process for outlook pc so the first thing i want to draw your attention to is this quick steps bar located right in the middle of the ribbon here and if i click on this you'll see that manage quick steps pulls up and you'll notice that there's quick steps that match and name to these action folders we created in the left task bar and we're going to come back to this in a different video i'll show you how to set this up but i did want to call your attention to it because you're going to ask why and how i'm moving those emails out of the inbox so quickly into the action folders and this is how so let me get out of there and let's talk about exactly how we are going to stack so if i go into the inbox here you remember from the original stack videos that you need to do several things when you first open up an email you have to open it you have to scan it then decide what to do and then act on it so i'm going to go ahead and i've already created these action folders here and i'm going to assign an action to each of these emails that's going to save me a lot of time because then i'm going to know exactly when i'm in my reply folder that everything in there needs to be replied to when in my do folder i'll know those are things i need to schedule or they're tasks people have sent me that i need to put on my calendar so i'm going to go ahead and by looking at this quickly i'm going to decide all right this one's a reply i'm going to go ahead and move this into the reply folder now if i go into the reply folder there it is it's it's been moved so quickly and we're going to do that with each of our emails until we have nothing left in the inbox so i'm going to decide that this one is this one is a do something to say this one's a do this one is a do this one's for review so again if i go into my review folder you'll see this is the last email i selected there it is and i'm going to keep moving through the entire inbox and i'm going to use my up and down arrows so same thing just going to go ahead i'm going to say this one's a do this one's a reply that's a meeting request this one is a remind a do let's say that this one's a reply this one's a reply this one is going to be a do definitely a do i do that one says please do so we'll know that is and we'll say this one's a reply and this one's a reminder and this one's a reply so if i go into my folders here first of all before i do that i'm going to take a huge deep breath and sigh of relief because i have nothing in my inbox it's at zero so that's incredible and then i'm going to go into my folders and continue the stacking process by working through the folders in the order that i like to do my workflow so remember i put a one next to reply because i like to reply to things first then i like to do things etc so i'm gonna go ahead and i'm going to flag the emails in real time that i want to go ahead and respond to right now some of them are going to take more time and i can leave those in the reply folder for now but in most cases i'll be able to take care of most of these very quickly so it'll be pretty easy so i'm going to flag it so i'll go ahead and flag i'm going to use the up and down arrows uh that one's going to take more time i'm going to come back to it and then i think for this one maybe i'll also flag this one at the bottom so i'm going to go ahead in real time and i'm back here and i'm going to respond to this right now so i'll go ahead and pop open the reply and i will just reply to it and then i'm going to send it now i dealt with this now so i don't need to leave this in the reply folder anymore i can go ahead and just archive it and it's out of my reply folder and it's done and i would do that as well with the other email that i flagged in the reply folder reply to it in real time um okay i'll get back to you and then i'm gonna send it and then i dealt with this already so i can go ahead and i can archive it and i'm done and i would do this throughout each of my action folders so i'm going to decide those ones i'm going to come back to later i'm going gonna go to do and i'm gonna go ahead and schedule those i will do this at a later video because with the do uh the do folder works a tiny bit differently so let's go into meat same thing i'd be able to pull this up put it on my calendar and be done and then archive it remind i read this already i know what i want to do with this i'm going to go ahead and archive this because i did it already so i'd work through each of my action folders in that way and then i'd come back to my inbox take a deep sigh of relief again because there's nothing in here and then uh anything else that i got during the course of the day would be emails that come in directly into my inbox and i would work through my inbox for the rest of the day okay let's talk about archiving an outlook pc now it's important to note that archiving and deleting are not the same thing deleting means you're really getting rid of it and you may sometimes be able to delete emails that you don't need anymore but usually we recommend archiving them instead an archiving is a non-destructive process that allows you to continue to search for that actual email even if it's not sitting in your inbox cluttering up your inbox and it's also you can do that with folders too so they're not clearing up your left taskbar so i'm going to show you a couple of ways that you can do it to start out with you're going to want to go to this where it says by date and this little down arrow and you're going to click that and you want to sort with oldest emails on top so you're gonna wanna click that now it's important to note that many people store ten thousand twenty thousand thirty thousand and more emails just living in their inbox so you're gonna wanna do this in groups of five hundred to a thousand emails so that you don't crash the system now will this take you a little bit of time the first time you do it yes but then you'll never have to do it again because you'll be on top of it with the stacking process the other important thing to note is you wanna archive back as far as three weeks ago from today's date so the reason that we say that is emails that you get between now and three weeks ago might be active things that you need to deal with generally anything that's three weeks ago and older you've either dealt with it you don't need to look at the email and you're not going to do anything with it so again it's not thrown out it's just archived so once you do this you're going to select a group of emails and 500 to a thousand emails and then you're just going to archive them and i want to show you if i go into my archive there it is they're not deleted they're there and again i can always do a search for them so i'm gonna go back into my inbox now you remember this little quick step bar here so we also went ahead and created one for archive and i'm gonna show you how to set that up when we talk about how to set up quick steps but just take one email to give you an example so the way i would do that is ctrl shift nine and then if we go here to archive you can see that email is there again not thrown out but not sitting in my inbox the nice thing is too that you can do that with folders that you are done with so if i decide i don't need traveling september 2021 that's done already i can literally select the folder and then i can do a shortcut and i'll talk to you about how to do this i did control shift v what that lets you do is it lets you move an item when you do that all i have to do is start typing in the name of the folder i want to move it to you can see it's already selected archive because i started typing in ar i'm going to say ok and when i do that it's going to move the folder into that actual uh archive so here it is i'm gonna select that say okay and then here it is you can see it's pulled up right underneath the archive and then if i decide wow i really need that folder i'm gonna need it to add some things to it because something else came up can always drag it right back into the when folder it's gonna ask me i say yes and it's back so that's one way that you can archive folders that you don't need anymore okay so this is about conversation view or emails with threads for outlook pc now we get a lot of questions about how to make sure email threads are staying grouped so you're not getting a bunch of emails that are loose that are should be connected because they're part of the same conversation so this enables you to keep all of your conversation threads grouped together so you'd go to this home ribbon here and make sure it's expanded so you can see what's here and then you would go to view and then see how it says show as conversations so what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to make sure show as conversations is clicked and then the other thing you want to do is where it says conversation settings you want to click show messages from other folders show senders above the subject it just makes it easier for you to see it and then anytime you get a conversation that comes in and there's a thread that goes back and forth you'll see that it will come up as a grouped thread and you probably saw that in some of my emails like this one you'll get a little arrow and if i click to expand it you'll see that these two emails are actually in the thread with this as the subject all right so one of the most important parts of the stack method process is making sure that you give yourself set times to stack and by set times i mean there's flexibility with that so while you look in my calendar here you can see that i have put three times on my calendar i have a time from 9 to 10 so an hour and this one actually says stack empty inbox and process folders and if i click on that you can see that i've marked that time as busy so i've given myself an hour to go through the stack method process which is going through the inbox putting the emails into the appropriate action folders and then working through the action folders i find that an hour is completely enough time to do that and sometimes i even need less than that can you move this time around absolutely you don't have time to do it from 9 to 10 a.m on monday and you know you'll have time to do it at the end of the day instead you can move it down here so it's completely up to you you have the power to move these around now a question i get a lot is but how am i going to set aside an hour of the workday to do this i want you to think for a minute how much time you're spending working on your email over the course of the day and how many times you get distracted by emails that come in whereas if you put aside one hour you could work through that in a concentrated block and get it done you'll notice there's also two other shorter times i've put on my calendar this one says stack work inbox and so does this one at the end of the day they're both a half hour and if we click in there you can see that we've actually marked the time as free for this one so this way if somebody needs to schedule a meeting over it it's fine and you can also move these around as well sometimes i move these down to the end of the day the really nice thing is you can also swap this out a lot some people like to do their half hour first thing in the morning another one at lunchtime and then they actually like to do the process of stacking at the end of the day to clear everything out before they leave for the day so however you want to do this is up to you again you can move them around as needs be with your schedule but the important part is that you're literally putting aside time to go through your inbox process your folders and then for the shorter periods of time you're literally working from your inbox okay so you've heard me mention quick steps in a lot of the other videos and this would be for outlook pc so what you would do is go to your home ribbon here and you'd see quick steps right in the middle and then this bar right here is going to be you press that arrow and you'll see manage quick steps pops up now what we're going to do is we're going to create quick steps that will move emails from your inbox into the action folders you saw me moving them so quickly and this is how you'll do it so let me show you how we're going to do this in order to make this an example that sticks i'm going to go ahead and delete this first quick step so that i can show you how to make it yourself so i'm going to delete that so what you would do is you would go to new at the bottom here and then you'd go down to custom and then you would type in what you want to call it so i'm going to call this one reply because i'm replacing the one i just deleted and then i'm going to choose an action and the action is going to be that i'm going to move it to a folder and the folder i'm going to choose it to in this case is one reply so that the quick step is going to match in name to the folder that i want to move it to now i'm going to add an action here and for me that's going to be to mark it as red but you may not want to do that and that's entirely up to you now this is the really crucial part down here you need to choose a shortcut key so it recognizes that anytime you have this quick step and moves it to the folder and the shortcut i'm going to choose is control shift one now could you name it a different thing yes but i like to make the number match the priority so everything is one here and it's easy to remember and then you're gonna say finish and then you'll see it's now been saved and you're gonna say okay so now let's do a test so let's say that i decided that this one is a reply so i'm going to go ahead and select this one and then i'm going to do control shift 1 and let's see if it went in there yes it did so we know that that quick step worked so that's how you would create quick steps and you would do that for each so if i go back and expand this you'll notice we have one reply to do three meet and so on so you would do it exactly the same way now for archive you would do this a little bit differently now archive is ctrl shift nine and i'm going to show you how to do control shift eight in a different video it's important to note that the quick steps only go up to the number nine so unfortunately you can't do 10 11 12 etc however you'll find that you have mainly seven main folders and you're going to have uh control shift eight will be to pop open a window and i'll show you how to do that one in a different video and ctrl shift nine is going to be how we do the archive so i'm going to go ahead and delete this archive step and then i'm going to do it the same exact way go to new custom i'm going to call this one archive the action i'm going to choose is that i want to move it to the folder and the folder is going to be archive i'm not going to add an action to this one for now and then the shortcut i'm gonna choose for archiving is ctrl shift nine and then i'm gonna say finish and you'll see archive is here it shows you what the shortcut key is and then i'm gonna hit okay so let's go back into our inbox and to say let's just give this a try and say that i want to go ahead and archive this email i'm going to do ctrl shift nine and let's check our archive and there it is so that's how you would do quick steps and you'd want to set that up for all of your action folders so when you're in your inbox you can just do control shift plus the number that matches the number of your action folder and it moves there without you having to drag it with your mouse okay so one of the most important things about feeling your anxiety drop away is not having a thousand folders in your left taskbar so i'm going to talk to you about cleaning up your left task bar a little bit now we talked about this a little bit earlier one important tip is to put your action folders in your inbox so that way you can collapse it you don't have to see a thousand folders underneath it this one isn't too bad because i literally only have folders nested inside the inbox and folders nested inside when unfortunately in outlook these are native items that i can't get rid of i wish i could but what i wanted to do is go ahead and create a visual separation so i didn't have to have this blend in with my action folders and so you might find this amusing but the easy thing to do here is this is literally a folder that has been named this way to create the visual separation so what you're going to literally do is you're going to go into new folder and then you're just going to hold shift down and do dotted lines which creates a solid line like this and you're gonna say okay when you say okay that creates the line and you can put this anywhere you want to let's say i wanted to put it under archive it would move it there and then that way archive would be over here with my other uh folders that i like to look at so this way it creates visual separation it looks clean and if you don't need it anymore you can just delete it and go back to how it was so i like to use that just to separate if i have projects i'll separate it that way let's talk about using rules for outlook pc now rules are going to be one of the most helpful things for you to use because it's going to let you keep everything you don't need to see in your inbox out of your inbox you'll usually want these emails to either go to the review folder in the case of things like newsletters for example or the when folder so if i expand this for example i could set this up so that anything that comes into my inbox goes to the working on project x folder instead of staying in my inbox and cluttering it up so how we do this is you go to the home ribbon go to rules go to create rule you're going to click whatever you want to choose so you could do from the radal team the subject contains i'm going to say anything from the radal team i want to go into a folder and the way i'm going to do that is i'm going to select move the item to the folder in this case i've chosen cc review because it's a newsletter but if you click select folder you can choose anything you want after you do that you're going to hit ok and then you can also add more rules on by going to advanced options and clicking any of these you can see it's quite an expansive menu that comes up so you can do that once you've selected what you want you want to click next now i've only chosen one rule so it's going to go ahead and have stop processing more rules on there and i'm going to click finish and then it's going to kick me back to that one window and you saw at the bottom of the screen it did send receive so now if i go to these rules i can click always move messages from the radal team click that and it's going to know that i want to put it in review and if i go into review see how it just got pulled out if i go into review there it is so now anytime something's sent to me by that radal team it's going to go right into the review folder and it's not going to go into my inbox notifications are something that we generally tend to have turned on and it's not great to do that because it's pretty overwhelming when you're trying to focus on getting a chunk of work done or you're trying to go to a meeting and you keep getting pinged by emails so we recommend that you turn your notifications off in outlook now you're still going to check your email it doesn't mean you won't check it but what it does mean is you won't be as distracted while you're actually trying to get some work accomplished so pretty easy this is for outlook pc you would go up to where it says file and then down here where it says options you would select that a pop-up will come up and when that happens you're going to click on mail here and then you're going to go to message arrival here at the bottom and see how i have some things checked here you're going to uncheck everything and then you're going to hit ok and then i won't get notifications anymore and i can focus on my work again doesn't mean you're not going to check your email but you won't be distracted by it when you really need to focus on something else so this is going to be how we use the do folder to enable us to easily schedule tasks that are linked to our calendar so what i'm going to do first is i'm going to create a quick step that's going to help us in this process so you remember the quick step is located right in the middle of the ribbon click on the arrow to expand and then for the purposes of this example i'm just going to delete this because i'm going to create a new quick step for you that you're going to use so we're going to do this like we did the other ones you're going to go to new we're going to go to custom and then we're going to call this one schedule because that's what we want to do we want to schedule things on our calendar and then this is really important see where it says choose an action you want to scroll down here until you select create an appointment with an attachment so that's the one you'd want to select create an appointment with an attachment and then i'm going to select add action and then i'm going to select that i want to categorize the message and the category that i'm going to choose is this category scheduled now you can always create a new category yourself under categorize and you can make it whatever color you want so i'm going to choose scheduled in this case and then i'm going to go ahead and choose a shortcut for it and the shortcut i'm going to choose for this is ctrl shift 8 because if you recall we have seven folders we haven't used ctrl shift eight yet and control chef nine is for archiving so ctrl shift eight i'm gonna say finish and then here i am and you can see that now there's a category on here that says schedule and whatever you've last saved as a quick step is what's on top and then i'm going to say ok so now i'm going to come over to calendar view and then i'm going to click on view up here and then view settings and this is where we're going to add the conditional formatting so that it links to the calendar and is color coded so it's really a helpful tool so while i'm here i'm going to select conditional formatting and then i'm going to select add now in this case i already selected ad and i called it due so i'm going to go ahead and i'm i'm going to delete this one so let's say i selected ad i created the name due and you can call us whatever you want but i'm going to select suggest that we call this due for this particular rule for your calendar and you can pick whatever color you want i'm going to pick green and then you can go to where it says condition and the condition for me that i've added is to search for the word do and you can do whatever you want here you can add more but this is a simple example so we're going to search for the word do and then say okay and then i'm going to say okay again say okay again and we're set up so now if i toggle back to my inbox and i am going to say i've already gone through my inbox for the day and i'm starting to work through my folders and i'm prioritizing what i want to do so i'm going to do this one i'm going to flag let's say let's do this one and i'm going to flag this one at the bottom and so what i would do here is i'm already hovering over here i'm going to do my control shift 8 shortcut i'm going to type the words do or the word do in front of this remember that typing the word do allows the conditional formatting to happen and then i can go ahead and change this for whatever time i want and i'm going to say okay so i will save close and you'll notice something happened here i have a green box the green box tells me that i've scheduled it and you'll see that the green box shows up in the actual email and says scheduled now an even nicer thing is is if i go to my actual calendar you'll see that same do please prep payroll shows up on my calendar scheduled and ready to go and it's color coded green because i set up the conditional formatting see how there's a paper clip here if you double click on it the email is actually attached to the calendar entry so if i needed to reference it it would be there and you can do this with any calendar entries of your choice let's talk about tracking with remind on outlook pc so sometimes you want to keep a record of an email that you've sent and while it does go into your sent folder so does everything else you send chances are you really only want to reference a handful of emails that you send out so i have a little bit of an easier way to keep track of it and that's by creating the email bc seeing yourself and putting it in the remind folder so let me go ahead and show you what i would do let's say i had this email here and i opened it and i wanted to reply to it so what i would do is i would reply to it and let's say i wanted to save this so instead of just hitting send i would go to the bcc field and i would bcc myself and then i would send it and then once i sent it i would be able to have it come into my inbox and now outlook takes a second to show up so we have to be a tiny bit patient with that but once it shows up in my inbox you'll see that i'm bcc'd so i see it as a new email and i can just move that specific email into my remind folder here it is now took a minute but here we go uh so here it is so i'm gonna close that and scroll to the top here's my new email unread so what i'm gonna do is i'm going to open it up i've bcced myself on it and then using ctrl shift 4 which is our quick step to put it in the remind folder i'm going to put that in the remind folder and then later on when i'm working through my folders i have it there as a reminder and this is great for emails where you're going to need to follow up with somebody you want to remind yourself to do something etcetera so we want an easy way to move our emails into the when folder and remember that the folders inside the when folder reference our active projects or active folders that we're working with right now so rather than dragging it in with the mouse there's actually an easier way so what you can do is you can select an email you can do control shift v v is in victor and when you do that it opens up this window and then all i have to do is start typing in the actual name of the folder and if this is collapsed you may have to just expand it so let's say i want this email to go into traveling september 2021 i just started typing in tr and immediately found it and then i'm going to hit enter and then if we go into traveling in september there it is so that's a really easy way to do it i'll do it one more time we literally go in control shift v opens up a box to move it into a folder i'm going to select let's say this time i want to put it on working on project x i'm going to hit return and then if i go into working on project x there it is so it's very easy to do and it saves you a tremendous amount of time sometimes you want to open up multiple emails at the same time when you're stacking in your inbox this is a really nice way also for you to feel a real sense of accomplishment because you can close each window once you're done so in outlook for pc it's pretty easy you would hold down the shift key and the down arrow and just select a range of emails so i'll do a couple of them here and then you would right click and you can see where it says open so you'd press that and you can see they each open up in their own window and i could go ahead and just hit reply deal with it in real time and then i would do that for each of these windows that are open and i would close them as i finish them and then you've got the selected range and you can archive all of those emails because they're out of your inbox for the day you