When you get a lot of email, it’s hard to keep track of it all. Prioritisation, following it up – it’s all enough to give you a headache.

The really great thing about Office 2007 is that it has a number of tools which can help with this enormously. Think about things like tagging, search folders, etc. Enter PIFEM, an email system set up by Microsoft Australia employees to manage their email and time in a more efficient way.

From Ian Palangio’s Business Productivity Blog:

PIFEM uses the out of the box Outlook 2007 features of flagging and categories to manage emails that you don’t want to action/complete immediately. Once you date/time flag an item it is no longer clogging up your brain with secondary thoughts. If you manage it well… you can eliminate a lot of distractions from email, and focus on your highest priority items with laser focus.

For those who are curious as to what it is based on, PIFEM uses Outlook functionality in combination with Getting Things Done and the 4 D’s of email management.

Ian has put together a OneNote notebook explaining how to configure Outlook to pull the whole system together. You can grab it from his post, here.

I’ve been using it for about a year now, though I’ve modified things here and there. I wouldn’t know how to work without it anymore.