Use Color-Coding to Highlight Important E-Mail

Hot on the heels of the excellent suggestion to use rules to simplify your Outlook inbox, Productivity Cafe's Susan Sabo serves up another valuable tip: Use color-coding to make important e-mail stand out and grab your attention.

For example, you could configure Outlook to automatically "colorize" messages that come from your boss or a client. Assign another color to mail received from team members, and so on. (Obviously you don't want to go overboard with the color-coding, lest your inbox turn into something resembling a box of crayons. Limit yourself to two or three colors.)

See the complete post for details on setting up color coding in Outlook; it's an extremely simple process. (Outlook Express and Thunderbird users can accomplish more or less the same thing using message rules.) For my part, all new messages I get from my beloved editors will be coded red so they get immediate action! (That's right: I know how to suck up.)