Folders used to be THE way you organized email Then webmail became very, very popular. But people clung to their folders. "I NEED MY FOLDERS, IT'S HOW I ORGANIZE EVERYTHING"
We get it. It's not easy to break paradigms or otherwise change your behavior.
Here's the problem with folders:
- they're cumbersome
- they take work to create and organize
- there's ONE folder in which an item may reside (that's limiting)
- they require scrolling and dragging
Labels, on the other hand, are very versatile:
- they're extensible (you can have one message contain multiple labels)
- they're easy to use in searches
- they can be combined for powerful filtering
- they're easier to manage
Labels can help in a variety of ways. Suppose you want to recognize outstanding work for your employees. You could have a label called "performance" that you apply to any messages where your coworker does a great job. Come review time just search for their name plus the label "performance" and you'll have all the good (and not so good, if you want) examples of how they did.
But the same email tagged with performance might be relevant for a specific project. You could use "performance" label on a message as well as a "building remodel" label. This kind of versatility is extremely powerful. The message doesn't "live" in any one specific folder: it merely has multiple labels associated with it.
If you get your brain around the "more than one label can be applied to more than one message" concept then you'll find a world of powerful searching, filtering and organization of your messages.
For more tips on how labels can simplify your email, check out this link for Google:
And this link for Microsoft 365 (called tags instead of labels)