Clean out your inbox every day. There is a very real psychological boost when you can leave your office at the end of the day with your Inbox empty—and it’s a pretty nice way to start your morning too. A habitually empty Inbox also means that any mail that is in the Inbox is still unread, so it’s easy to tell what you still need to read.

Handle each e-mail message only once. Many time management systems share a similar mantra regarding handling each e-mail message exactly once. Open it, read it, decide what you have to do about the message and do it. Right now. For most people, a lot of their mail requires no action beyond reading it. If that’s the case, delete (or file) mail items immediately. Move any items that require action to a folder other than the Inbox, assigning a color category to make it easier to locate or set a follow-up flag to remind you of a deadline if needed.

Turn off the Reading Pane if you have a hard time emptying your Inbox. While the Reading Pane makes it easy to read a piece of mail quickly, the Reading Pane also makes it easy to read mail without dealing with it.

Use rules to sort mail that you don’t need to read immediately into folders as it arrives. You can also assign categories using rules as mail arrives, providing additional information that you can use to locate that mail later.

Use a combination of folders and categories to manage your mail. Create folders to contain large groups of mail, and then categorize the messages to display a manageable subset of messages.

Use search folders to create customized views of your Outlook 2007 items. Search folders automatically filter the contents of a list of folders you specify based on the set of criteria found in the Advanced Find dialog box. This lets you see specific sets of messages by simply selecting a folder.

Create custom views of messages. Custom views that filter Outlook 2007 items are another powerful tool, letting you quickly switch between various subsets of messages. Because views can be used in multiple folders, you can create a view once and reuse it in many places.

If you have lots of e-mail, consider using multiple .pst files to separate disparate information into discrete data stores. In addition to segregating data storage, this makes it easy to select specific data sets for Instant Search by clicking the arrow next to All Mail Items in the Navigation Pane.