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Hello and welcome to Collaboration Coach.
It's Matt, and I'm going to give you some tips to use with Outlook...
...to save you time and make you more productive.
The three tips I've got for you today are...
turning off notifications with Outlook
so - stop those distractions that make you less productive;
automatically answering email with a cc rule
so - answering cc messages takes up time
and these tips will help you create an automatic reply to messages when you're on the cc line;
and finally, take action with Quick steps - save time by automating the things that you do regularly.
Alright, here we go tip one - turning off alerts in Outlook.
One of the key things to being productive is to avoid distractions.
One huge distraction we all face are notifications,
whether it's on your phone or social media - notifications are everywhere
so if you plan your day so you choose when to read your email,
you don't need to be notified when email arrives.
This tip shows you how to switch them off in Outlook.
To do that, go to the file menu and choose "Options".
Then choose "Mail" and then go to the "Mail arrival" section,
then uncheck "Play a sound", "Show an envelope icon" and "Display a desktop alert",
and then click "ok".
Now you can work in peace without any distracting notifications from Outlook.
So tip 2 - answer email automatically with a cc rule.
Reading and answering messages where you're on the cc line takes up your time
and is probably not that important
so in this tip I'm going to show you how to create an inbox rule
that politely replies to the sender and moves the email out of your inbox and into a separate folder.
First of all let's create the new folder where the cc emails will be moved to.
Select your mailbox and right click it and then choose "New folder",
and I'm just going to call it "cc mail" and there we go.
Now I'm going to make the rule that will send a reply and move the email.
To do that, just go to the "Home" tab and expand it if you have to
so you can see the rules drop down here,
and then choose "Manage rules and alerts".
Then you choose "new rule" and come down to this "Start from a blank rule" section,
and choose "Apply rule on messages I receive" and then choose "Next".
Now from here you want to choose "where my name is in the cc box" and then you choose "Next".
On the next page you want to choose from step one - "move it to a specified folder"
and then down here you want to choose "have the server reply using a specific message".
Now in step two you need to make some further configurations
so you choose the "specific message" link here,
and when you press that it's going to open up a new message,
and this is the message that is going to be sent to the person who sent you the email.
You just need to give it a subject - I'm just going to call this "automatic cc reply",
so I'm going to put some example text in here which describes why I've sent the reply.
So once you're done, you're happy with your email,
you just choose "Save and close" which takes you back to the wizard.
The next step is to choose the specified folder.
So from step two you choose the specified link.
Now you're going to choose the "cc mail" folder that you created earlier.
Click "ok" and now that configuration is finished.
So now I can choose the "finish" button and then "ok",
and then any new email that comes in will send a reply to the sender
and automatically move the email to the cc mail folder
and I won't be bothered with unimportant email.
So tip 3 is to take action with Quick steps.
Quick steps are like workflow for email.
When an email comes in you can action it with a Quick step.
A Quick step can be one or many steps to speed up the process of responding to that message,
so for example, you could have a Quick step that creates a meeting with a specific team with one press of a button.
In this example I'm going to show you how to create a new meeting with the sales and marketing team...
...from an email using a Quick step.
All I need to do is go to the "Home" tab, choose the "Quick steps" drop down from the ribbon,
and then choose "New Meeting".
Then I'm going to change the name to add "Sales and Marketing" on the end here.
So next to the "To" box I'm going to type "Sales and Marketing",
and you can see it makes suggestions to me based on what I type, and then I choose "finish".
So once that's done, whenever an email comes in that I want to schedule a meeting to discuss...
...I just choose the Quick step,
it will create the meeting and address it automatically to the Sales and Marketing team,
and then I can choose the time and date and send it.
So that's it - that's our tips to use with Outlook to save you time and make you more productive.
Thank you so much for watching, and I'll see you next time.
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