Three ways to keep track of if you get responses to emails you have sent
Datum: 2025-12-03 08:18
You send emails, but do you get a response? You don’t know that beforehand. Some emails are not that important to get a response to, while for others you really want to get a reply. If you don’t hear from the recipient for a while, you want to follow up and hear what they have to say about what you sent.
For you who prefer listening to reading, this post is also available as an episode of the ""Done!"" podcast:
How can you keep track of it?
But with so many emails coming in every day and every week, how can you keep track of which emails you haven’t received a response to yet? Here are three ideas I have seen for how to do this:
- You can set a red follow-up flag on the email you sent in Outlook. When you set the flag, you can also specify when you should follow up to check if you have received a response. You can choose this week, next week, or a specific date. Then, in the ”flagged emails” folder, you will see all the emails you flagged for follow-up that you haven’t got a response for yet.
- You don’t want to use flags, because you use the flag feature to automatically create to-do tasks in Microsoft To-Do from emails that require you to do something other than respond immediately. Instead, you put the emails you want to keep track of in a separate folder that you look in every day or once a week, and then follow up on the ones you have expected a response to by now. (For a while, I had a rule that moved any emails I sent containing a question mark to a separate follow-up folder. If I asked something, I wanted an answer, I figured.)
- You create a to-do task based on the email, so that if you haven’t received a response yet, you will contact the recipient again. This is how I do it, because then in my to-do list I can get an overview of everything that needs to be done in a project — both tasks I have to do, and tasks I’m waiting for from other people (like responses to emails I sent). You can set a due date for your to-do task, so that you will be alerted when you should have received the response you are waiting for.
Do this
If you haven’t yet done so, decide on a way to easily keep track of if you get responses to the important emails you have sent. It could be one of the ways I have suggested here, or something completely different.
Try the new way for a few weeks and then evaluate. You can ask yourself:
- Did this make it easier for you to keep track of if you get responses than before?
- Is the way simple enough to use, so that it doesn’t take up unnecessary time from your most important tasks?
- If you were to improve the way a notch, what would you change?
More control with less effort
If you have a way to keep track of if you get responses to your most important emails, you don’t have to worry about whether you got a response or not. Even if you send a lot of emails, you can trust that you have control — without much effort.
What is your way?
Do you have any other way of keeping track of if you get replies to emails you have sent? Let me know!
(Do you get a lot of emails in your inbox to handle every day? Rules and filters make the heavy email-load lighter!)
There are more structure tricks to discover!
If you want more tips on how to create good structure at work, there are many ways to get that from me - in podcasts, videos, books, talks and other formats.
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