Color categories: an email's status at a glance

You can only put an email in one folder, but you can give it more than one category. Moving a message into a folder makes it vanish from your main view and forces a single classification, while a color category stays visible right in your inbox and can be combined with others — an email can be both “Waiting on reply” and “Client A” at the same time, with no need to decide which single folder it really belongs to.

A typical scenario

Manager Hana communicates with a dozen clients at once, and her inbox is a mix of emails she's waiting on a reply to, emails she delegated to colleagues, and ones she still needs to read through again herself. Without categories, that means either a complicated web of subfolders for every combination of status and client, or simply scanning the whole inbox every time she needs to find out what she's still waiting on. With color categories, she sees a message's status at a glance by color, even though the email stays in a single main folder — one look at the inbox, or one click on a category filter, is all it takes.

How to do it

1. Right-click a message and select Categorize.
2. The first time you use it, name your categories based on how you actually work — say, “Waiting on reply,” “Delegated,” “Client A,” “To review.” Each category can also get its own color, so a message's status is visible at a glance without reading the text.
3. You can assign a single email multiple categories at once if more than one status applies to it — say, both “Client A” and “Waiting on reply” at the same time.
4. Filter by category by clicking the relevant color swatch in the message list, or by searching directly with the query category:"Waiting" in the search box.
5. The same categories work on calendar events too, so you can color-code your whole week by meeting type — internal, client, personal — and see your week's layout at a glance.
6. Review your list of categories from time to time and delete or rename the ones you don't use — the system only works as long as you keep it clear, and it gradually loses its point once you've got dozens of forgotten colors in it.

The best tools

• Categories in Outlook — a built-in, free feature that works across both mail and calendar with no extra setup.
• Follow-up flags — a companion tool for emails that require a specific action by a specific date; pairs well with categories.
• Rules in Outlook — for automatically assigning categories based on sender or subject, so it doesn't have to happen manually for every single email.

What you get out of it

• Time: an estimated five minutes a day from seeing a message's status instantly, without having to reopen and reread it.
• Visibility into work in progress: one filter shows you everything you're waiting on a reply for across your whole inbox, regardless of when the email arrived.
• Less risk of something slipping through: delegated or pending emails don't get lost among the rest, because they're color-coded.
• A consistent system across mail and calendar: a category system you set up once works on both, so you only have to learn it once.
• Better visibility for the whole team: if you share categories with an assistant or a deputy, you both see the same mail status in the same color, with no need to explain it to each other.

Pro tip

Combine categories with search — the query category:"Waiting" instantly finds every pending email across your entire mailbox, including archived ones, without having to browse individual folders by hand.