How to Manage Outlook Effectively

Keep monitoring and prioritizing the mails are big challenge when you work with busy Mailers. In this post, I would like to bring you some suggestions/idea to manage the mails especially Outlook. Controlling time-wasters and focusing on important tasks will lead to achieve long-term goals.

First time First Serve

Whenever you read an email, flag it or decide what action or response it needs. Instead of reading it again, do at first time. Don’t read first few lines and keep it for later reading. It kills your time. Prioritize the task by reminders or Follow up flags.

Divide and Rule

Split the mails and tag it with related category. So that it gets easier to just glance at the e-mails and know, how much work you have from which category. Mails can be possible in below categories like Manager follow up, client follow up, team follow up, pending action etc., so tag it and work accordingly

Rule it

One of the best way to manage your work mailbox is to create rules. If you receive multiple emails from various senders and which you don’t want to miss ever, you can create a rule and move these e-mails directly to a designated folder. Rules can be created for all mails from particular sender or particular keywords or particular scenario to push it in particular folder or make alert or custom reply. This will help to focus attention for a particular sender.

Goto Manage Rules and Alerts-> Create new Rule, select new

Know how to search

Art of search is one of the key aspect in Digital world. Here in Outlook, when you click the search box, Outlook brings the SEARCH tag with multiple feature. If you click Has Attachments, it will brings you the mail with attachment. It gives options of search by From sender name or Subject. Unread emails can be grabbed quickly here. We can set chronological limit for the search. Your recent search strings can be reused or viewed in “Recent Searches” Option.

Responsible Responds

Though not every email seeks the reply, however important mails are looking for your response. So it is advisable to keep responding to the mail so that reminder mails will be avoided. Keep using Out of Office features so that senders can understand and act accordingly. For critical mails, set auto replies like “working on it” so that send keep wait till your response.