Ha. Just tried to upvote your comment and opened your profile instead. Still appreciate the information density, but I can see how it’s a pain for people who are more active here than I.
It might not be worth it to you, but you might try a slightly better quality printer paper. I’m using a generic store brand premium laser/inkjet paper (24 lb/90 gsm), and I’m not getting any bleed through or feathering. It costs more than normal printer paper, but handles ink well and goes on sale often.
I’m with you. Although I recently started writing a lot more than usual. I ended up buying a used wire binding machine. I’ve been making notebooks with nice printer paper and cardboard from cereal boxes recently. It’s worked surprisingly well, although I may get a better source of cover cardboard soon. The nice part is that I can make notebooks of any size and any paper (like watercolor paper for sketchbooks) with lots of pages. Much simpler than sewing the binding.
Are you at a firm? I’d encourage you to ask the people on your team. It wouldn’t be a weird question to ask a fellow associate (or if you are comfortable, the partner).
You also want to make sure you understand your firm’s email archiving and retention policy. Some firms have specific controls in place (systems that delete uncategorized emails from your inbox after a certain amount of time).
I worked on M&A deals, but doing the IP/Privacy support and not running the whole deal. My structure while working at a bigger firm, which wasn’t perfect, but worked, was to have a folder for each client and a folder for each big client project/deal. Then just keep moving emails to each project folder as they came in. I didn’t really trust rules to do it for me automatically, but that’s just me.
I also set up Outlook to file reply messages in the folder where the original email was. Then I would generally respond only after I’d move the email.
I feel like I’m rambling now, but in case this is remotely helpful, here are a few other thoughts/pain points:
1. I kept my tasks list separate from my inbox.
2. Hot keys are great, especially for moving to folders and finding emails in a thread. There’s not much you need a mouse for after a while.
3. Moving emails to folders is slow if outlook has to populate the huge list of potential folders each time. If you have lots of clients, it may make sense to split things up alphabetically first (Clients A-G in one folder, etc.).
4. This system was also helpful for syncing emails to the correct folder in the firm document management system, which is a whole separate conversation.
Feel free to disregard, but I figured I’d pass along my system, as it seems to be pretty different from what I’m reading here. Firms are interesting animals, especially where record keeping is involved.