After spending time on the road, you can come back to find your Outlook Inbox overgrown and a weedy mess.  Although some people have professed allegiance to the “Inbox2” technique (which means dumping the mail into a folder that you never really check again), this could mean you may miss important emails. The color coding technique does help mitigate that risk; however there’s nothing like a healthy Outlook triage session. This will have you happy again to receive fresh emails. You too can son have an inbox as fresh as the first day of school.

The technique is an adaptation of the infamous Sean Seibel triage, which was explained to me in an in depth 90 minute serious discussion.  And of the many Outlooking techniques I have learned over the years, this one lasted a year, so definitely worthy to evangelize.

1. First, you have to have an insanely messy inbox – minimum of 500 emails, no more than 3000 (otherwise you need to consider the Inbox2 technique, created by someone who shall remain nameless in case you are wondering why he hasn’t responded to an email you sent him).
2. Most importantly, you need to select the option to Work Offline. Otherwise you’ll feel like you are digging a hole in the sand at high tide.
3. Next, you’ll need to create at 4 folders on your server (vs. local PST file). Keeping on the server ensures you have access to them when you are on the road.  Create the folders Action, Reference, Review, & Review (Internet) as a subdirectory of yourInbox:
   
• The Action folder is for items requiring a response from you.
• The Review folder is things you should read but don’t need to comment on.
• Likewise with the Review (Internet), except these mails contain information from the web. The separation is to create a separate sync category for offline & online documents. This way, you keep all offline content in one place for reviewing the folder from your cell phone or when you are on the plane. If you are always connected, you can combine the two Review folders.
• The Reference folder is for those FWs that people send you (don’t you love forwards). At first glance, it looks like TMI and meaningless but what if you need it one day? So save it as Reference until you can digest or file it properly .
4. Now you begin triaging. Write down the number of mails you are starting with.  Look at the clock and give yourself either 30 minutes or 60 minutes of uninterrupted time.  Be sure to have a beverage handy and turn off your cell phone. Open up your Inbox and start filing the email. Do not read the email, do not take any action unless it will take you less than 15 seconds.   When the time block has ended, check your rate. You’ll want to improve this over time.
5. Now most importantly, you’ll need to schedule a meeting with yourself to review those action items. Take time at the end or start of a day to clear out any actions. 
6. Set up your cell phone to sync with the Review folder.
7. Set up weekly meeting with yourself to read the online content in the Review (Internet) folder.

If you liked this tip, you may also like:

Sling Alibi | Color code your Outlook 2010 Inbox Messages

.NYC : Scheduling against multiple time zones with Outlook 2010

Windows LiveWriter is an easy to use blog editor, that has a rich ecosystem of add-ins, such as the Facebook Like plugin by Guy Burstein.  In order to use the Windows based plug in with the WordPress PHP application, you’ll need to enable remote procedure calls with XML. Otherwise you will see the error “Server Error 405 Occurred. XML-RPC services are disabled on this blog.”

In order to set it up – navigate to the options-writing.php page using your browser and check the box to enable XML-RPC.

WordPress is the most popular PHP application running on Windows.  SlingAlibi currently runs on BlogEngine.NET. We decided to set up a second blog engine with WordPress, running side by side on Windows Server with BlogEngine.NET. 

The steps are super easy thanks to the Web Platform Installer, we’ll walk through them with screenshots below. In essence, it takes 5 steps to host PHP on Windows Server 2008 via WordPress (assuming your hoster supports PHP and MySql):

1. Download WebPI
2. FTP the WordPress files to your webserver
3. Create a blank MySql database
4. Configure the wp-config.php file to point to #2 and #3
5. Launch the wp-admin/install.php file in a browser and finish the setup.

Download Web Platform Installer

The easiest way to pull down WordPress for Windows is through the Web Platform Installer (WebPI).  WebPI will automatically pull down any necessary dependencies such as PHP and MySql:

In the Web Applications tab, you can choose

FTP the Files

This is simple enough to do. I use FileZilla to bring over the WP files, which I have stored in a directory called AntiqueCurator.

Create a MySQL Database

WebHost4Life uses PHPMyAdmin, a popular tool for managing my database. To access it, click on MySqlManager on your control panel. This will launch PHPMyAdmin. Type in a database name and click the Create button.

Edit the WP-Config file with your server and database information

Open up the WP-Config file in Notepad, and just update the user, password, database, and server fields with your data. Be sure to FTP the updated file over to the server.

Run the installation page in a browser

From the server, open the /wp-admin/install.php page and walk through the wizard.