If you interact with more than three people at work, and especially if you are in a matrix management position, do you find it difficult to answer the following question:

Who still owes me a reply to a message I sent?

Unless you have a system to track the requests you send via email, only when you actually need the information as input to another task, will you remember, for example, that Jim hasn't reviewed those figures you emailed him last week. At this point, if the response hasn't arrived, it's almost too late because you cannot get on with your own work, and your own schedule and commitments are affected.

Here's a trick for keeping track:

1. Create an Outlook folder called "Waiting For Answer".
2. Whenever you write a message that requires an answer, use SpeedFiler to file the outgoing message in the "Waiting For Answer" folder.
3. Check the contents of the "Waiting For Answer" folder a few times a day, and remove the messages that have received a response. If it's getting close to when you need a reply and it still hasn't arrived, it's time to send a reminder…

If you are in this situation, your outgoing mail probably ends up on the Exchange server, in the Sent Items folder of your Exchange store, and not in your local data store with the rest of your mail.

If you have SpeedFiler, you don't have to settle for this situation. Unlike bare-bones Outlook, SpeedFiler allows you to specify an alternative default folder for your sent mail. Instead of having your outgoing mail end up on the server, you can now specify that the default location for sent mail should be your local Sent Items folder.

The above screenshot shows the setting that you need to use in order to re-route outgoing mail to your local data store. This will only affect outgoing items for which you do not specify a more specific location when you click the Send button.

Don't be tempted to switch to the mouse in order to highlight and confirm your choice! It's much quicker not to move your hands away from the keyboard, and instead, to use the up/down arrow keys to move up and down the list of matches. Even though the cursor starts out in the Folder Name text field, the arrow keys will act on the tree, moving the focus to the tree automatically.

Opening up a branch in the tree is also easy: just use the right arrow ->. Closing a branch is just as easy. You guessed it: use the left arrow <-.

Once you have highlighted the relevant folder, just hit Enter -- don't bother using the mouse.

To summarize the steps:

1. Type Ctrl+Shift+V or Ctrl+Y to open the folder selection window for filing or navigation, respectively.
2. Type the beginning of the folder name.
3. If there are multiple matching folders, use the arrow keys (typically just the up/down keys are needed). If there is only one matching folder, it will be displayed at its natural position in the tree -- skip this step.
4. Hit Enter.

This procedure is super-fast and can take 3-5 seconds instead of up to a minute when you drag-and-drop or use the original Outlook folder selection window.

The Outlook folders tree shows folders in alphabetical order only. In order to display them in a different order, you can use either of the following methods:

• Promote a specific folder to the top of the list
  If you want a specific folder to appear before the others, rename it with a punctuation mark at the beginning of its name. For instance, if you want the "Pending" folder to appear first, rename it "!Pending" or "_Pending".
   
• Define the position of each folder in the list
  If you want to define the position of each folder, just prefix each folder name with a number, for example:  
   

When you use SpeedFiler to file messages in these folders, you do not have to type the numbers, as SpeedFiler looks for matches anywhere in a folder name, not just the beginning. So if you want to file an item in "1 Rejected", just open the File In Folder window and start typing the word "rejected" until you see "1 Rejected" in the list of matching folders.

When you send a reply to a message that is sitting in your inbox, SpeedFiler prompts you for a folder. Once you've sent the reply, the original is still sitting in the inbox. You can very quickly file this in the same folder as the reply:

1. Highlight the original message in the inbox. 
2. Press Ctrl+Shift+V, followed by Enter.

This works because Ctrl+Shift+V brings up the File In Folder window, with the most recently used folder already selected. This is the same folder in which you just filed the reply, so all you need to do is approve the choice by pressing Enter.