Organize Your Outlook E-mail Better with Category Manager

I know in my heart that if I was only slightly more organized, I'd have published a few novels, be President, and married to Halle Berry. One productivity brick in the efficiency wall (is that even a thing?) is taking charge of your e-mail.

Outlook's categories are incredibly powerful, of course, but only if you actually use them. That's where a new program I've found comes in: Category Manager forces you to assign categories to your e-mail as you work.

You already know how important Outlook categories are if you watched my groundbreaking, award-winning video tutorial on how to organize your e-mail with categories and flags. But it can be challenging to remember to apply categories to begin with.

Outlook Manager is a small window that runs alongside Outlook and puts the categories one click away. More importantly, each time you read an e-mail, it enforces category assignments.

It has some more advanced features, as well. You can teach it category templates, for example, and automatically apply one or more categories to groups of selected e-mails with one click. It's also easier to remove categories from messages using Category Manager.

It's a nifty little tool, and you can use it free for 30 days. Unfortunately, from there, things go haywire. One copy costs $30 (personally, I'd be willing to pay $5) and the price drops incrementally for volume purchases. Need 150 copies? That's $15/seat. A full site license costs $3300, for which I would expect to also get a ride in the space shuttle. I already e-mailed the fine folks at VBOffice to complain about the price. If you also think that you'd use this app except that the pricing is clown-shoe-insane, send them a note as well.