Update: Low Cal Outlook Regime

It's six months now since I switched the way I file email in Outlook.  Rather than maintain a complex folder structure for my mail I decided to embrace desktop search in Office 2007 and cut down to just three folders.  Six months later and I won't be going back. 

The psychological shift was tougher than I thought it would be.  Many's the time I have paused before filing an item and thought for just a moment about creating a new folder for a certain class of mail.  I succumbed just once, creating a new folder for a trip I was planning.  I wanted to be 100% sure I could find all the flight, parking, hotel details to print out before departure.  Looking back, what I probably should have done is file those items to OneNote.

I still fret sometimes when filing items that I won't be able to find things again.  I wish there was an easy way to tag mail before I file.  Somewhere I can simply add a delimited list of keywords to give me an additional comfort factor.  Yes, I know there are categories, but that's not what I am looking for in this instance.  Maybe we'll see that in O14.

I am happy to report though, I am yet to lose anything or struggle to find an item I need to refer back to.  Instant search hasn't let me down.  In any query I can narrow down the potential matches quickly to less than 20 items by searching on the name of the sender and and a keyword I expect to be in the text of the mail.  This turns out to be a very common search pattern.  It's very rare that I will search for a mail item and be unable to remember the sender of the item I am looking for.