Use these 10 tips and tricks to manage your inbox and maximize your productivity with
Microsoft Outlook.
#1 Inbox Zero Approach.
This is my Outlook inbox.
I don't follow the Inbox Zero approach in its purest definition, but I do manage my
email very close to this concept.
The goal is to process all the mail in my inbox by reviewing it only once and making
an immediate decision of how to handle each message.
It's not about having zero messages in my inbox even though that does happen occasionally.
It's about processing mail the most efficient way possible and having close to zero stress
over what's in my inbox.
Two years ago, when I worked full time as an IT Director, I received around 300 messages
per day.
I had to become efficient to stay on top of my Outlook inbox and employed something like
Inbox Zero even before I knew what it was.
So if you would like to be email stress free consider the Inbox Zero approach.
#2 The 4D Method.
When I take time to go through my email messages, I employ the 4D Method - Delete, Do, Delegate,
or Defer.
Treat every email message as a task and apply one of these four decisions to it immediately
when you read it and move on to the next.
Don't look back.
Deleting a message is the easiest.
If you have a message that does not require your action and you don't need to keep it
for reference, then delete it.
That may be hard for you if you think you'll need the message in the future but once you
employ this technique, you'll soon realize that it will save you a bunch of time and
your fear of missing an email will disappear.
After you have deleted messages from your inbox you are left with ones that will require
action.
If that action can be done in a couple of minutes or less, then do them now.
It allows you to complete the task quickly and delete the message when you're done.
Many messages don't require your direct action and can be delegated to someone else.
Forward those messages to the right person with any additional information they need
and get it out of your inbox.
Delegated messages may need to be turned into tasks for follow-up as well and I'll cover
that in a later tip.
Messages you can't delete, do within a couple minutes, or delegate to someone else will
need to be deferred to your organized system of email management and the rest of the tips
in this video will show you some helpful ways to handle them.
Be aware that not every message will fall nicely into one of these 4D's and you'll have
to make tough decisions on occasion.
The important thing to remember is that you don't want to ignore a decision and leave
the message in your inbox.
That's what creates stress and makes you less efficient.
It's better to commit to a decision even if it may be wrong but I guarantee you'll make
less mistakes employing this 4D method than you would normally experience handling mail
in a messy inbox.
#3 Create Folders.
In order to handle your deferred mail, you need to create a folder structure under your
inbox.
You can do this by right-clicking on your inbox folder and choosing New Folder.
These folders allow you to move mail from your inbox leaving only the mail you have
not processed and applied the 4D method to yet.
Create a folder structure that is meaningful based on the categories of mail you need to
keep.
It's generally best to have no more folders than what fits on the screen.
True Inbox Zero followers will create an Action folder at the top of this list and move action
items that cannot be completed immediately into this folder.
I prefer to leave those action items in my inbox instead.
Since they're ordered by date, I can easily separate new mail from older ones and I don't
have to go to another folder to review any action items.
So my inbox becomes a task list as well.
As you can see from my folder structure, I have created personal and business folders
and I even have some with subfolders.
That's beneficial for moving messages around easily and staying organized.
#4 Create Rules.
With Outlook you can create rules to automatically process incoming mail.
If you want to apply a rule to a specific message, click on the message first and then
go to Rules from the Home tab.
Here it comes up with an option to always move messages from that contact.
If you click on that you can choose the folder that you want to move those messages into
automatically.
Hit OK and it creates a rule and moves those messages.
You can come back to the rules and manage the rules that are already there.
Here you can see the Amazon Associate rule that I created and the description of the
details of how it's processing the mail.
You can also add new rules here with a whole bunch of different options of how you want
to move or flag messages and apply rules to specific messages in your inbox.
It's a method to make you more efficient.
#5 Quick Steps.
If you prefer more control over your messages another option is Quick Steps.
Quick Steps is also available from the Home tab and allows you to trigger multiple steps
of email management with a single click from the menu.
When you create a new Quick Step, it gives you choices to move messages to another folder,
to flag and move them, send a new email, forward an email, create a new meeting from that message,
or do a custom quick step.
Let's go ahead and move to a folder and we're going to choose the folder for Amazon, and
we'll also check this box to mark it as read.
Hit Finish and OK and it's now created an entry up here to move messages to the amazon
folder.
Now I can click on an email and with one click it marks that as read and moves it into the
Amazon folder.
You can use Quick Steps to automatically forward messages that you plan to delegate, and it
makes it easy to move messages when you defer them.
They work well with the 4D methods.
#6 Disable Notifications.
There is nothing worse than getting constant pop-ups each time you receive an email.
To avoid these distractions, you can disable notifications for Outlook.
They normally come up here in the notification center.
If you go to the top and click on Manage Notifications that brings up the notifications and actions
center.
Scroll down through this list until you find Microsoft Outlook and turn that off.
That will eliminate all of those pop-ups when you receive emails.
It's also a good idea to scroll up here until you see Mail and turn it off as well since
that may trigger some notifications as well.
Get rid of those distractions and you can focus better on your email tasks.
#7 Block Junk Email.
We all receive spam at one point or another but with Outlook you can block junk emails
by right-clicking on the offending message and adding it to the blocked email list.
Come down here to Junk and choose Block Sender.
There's also an option here to block the sender's full domain and that will get rid of everything
based on that domain address.
I'm going to go ahead and add this one to the block sender list and it gets rid of that
message moves it into your junk email folder and adds it to your blocked list.
You can also come down to the junk list and go to Junk Email Options.
This is where you can mark people as safe senders.
You can set up a safe recipient address so that anything that goes to that email address
will be accepted.
You can look at your block senders list and add or delete people to that and you can disable
international emails.
Here you have the level of junk email protection you want to enable and, in this case, I have
no automatic filtering but mail from block senders is still moved to the junk email folders.
You can set low or high if you want the most obvious junk to be detected automatically
and you can restrict it to only accept email for people that are in your safe lists.
If you don't want those emails to go to your junk email folder then you can permanently
delete them.
All of these methods will help you get rid of a lot of spam mail that distracts you from
getting your work done.
#8 Create a To-Do.
If you have a message that requires action and can't be completed immediately you may
want to turn it into a To-Do task.
This can be done easily by selecting a message, clicking on it, and dragging it down to the
to-do list.
That turns that message into a task that you can set up all kinds of criteria for.
You can set the start date, when it's due, change the status, different priority levels,
mark completions, even put in reminders, and you can assign these tasks to other people
in your organization.
When it's all done Save and Close it and now you have a task listed in your to-do list.
Open that task up and you can mark it complete, and it removes it from your to-do list.
I'll also mention that you can right-click and drag and drop it onto the to-do list and
it gives you multiple options here.
One of which is to move it here instead of copying it.
That will clear it out of your inbox by turning your email messages into tasks.
It takes it away from your inbox and puts it into a form that easily lets you manage
it as a step-by-step task.
This will greatly reduce your anxiety over what's in your inbox.
#9 Schedule It.
Rather than turning an email into a task with a due date you could schedule it as a calendar
appointment.
Do the same thing by dragging and dropping it down here to the calendar entry instead
of the to-do list.
That opens up a new calendar entry and copies the body of the message into this calendar
entry.
Here you can invite attendees, set reminders, put a start time and date, and add it to your
calendar.
There are a few differences between a to-do list task and a calendar entry, so you have
to decide which one makes the most sense but in both cases, it takes it out of your inbox
and gets rid of the anxiety.
Then you can schedule it and deal with it later.
#10 Choose Focus Time.
A final tip to maximize your productivity is to choose focus time to process your Outlook
mail.
Just take a few minutes to go through your messages and apply the 4D method to each by
immersing yourself in your emails in short bursts throughout the day.
You'll be much more efficient and the stress over what's in your inbox will be gone when
you focus on other tasks.
After applying these principles to my outlook management, I knew I was working the most
efficient way possible.
Even my Microsoft Office Analytics stats showed I was responding quicker to other people than
they were to me and I was processing more mail in any given day than most people in
my company.
Now go apply these tips and tricks to maximize your productivity using Outlook.
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