Outlook Power Series: Use Rule Automation to Save Time & Organize Your Inbox

How much time do you spend each day sifting through emails, moving them into folders, or tagging them for follow up? The average person spends 28% of their workday dealing with email messages. 

That’s about 2.6 hours per day just handling messages, which is a pretty significant chunk of time. Often, it’s the unruliness of all those incoming emails that makes sorting through them time consuming.

Some people try to power through to a “zero-inbox” by end of day by moving emails to other folders (which may still need to be addressed later), and others just watch their email inbox fill up helplessly, knowing that in about a month, they’ll end up deleting old ones they never got to (hoping the sender re-emailed them later or contacted them another way).

What many people don’t realize is that modern office IT is designed to make workflows easier if you know what tools to use, and they may already have an app that could significantly cut down on their time spent handling email.

Outlook is a powerful email application that has only gotten better over time, as have most MS Office programs. And one particularly helpful area of the program is where you set up automation rules. These rules can do automatically, what’s usually done by hand as well as keep you on top of the most important messages.

The Best Automations to Use in Outlook

Anyone can benefit from a helping hand keeping their inbox organized and reducing the time it takes to go through email every day. Here are some Outlook Power Tips to make you a pro at putting together an inbox that organizes itself!

First, here are two ways you can get to the rules panel:

1.    Select File > Manage Rules & Alerts

2.    Right-click on a message and choose Rules

You can create the rule manually or let the Rules Wizard guide you with some templates.

Moving Messages to a Folder Automatically

One of the easiest and most popular automations to use is to move incoming messages to a particular mail folder automatically based upon things like the sender or keywords in the subject line.

This can help you ensure you don’t miss an important email from a client because it’s buried in the middle of a bunch of spam. It’s also a way to save you time from having to manually sort your messages into folders by letting Outlook do it for you.

Just set up a Rule that sets the parameter of how you want the system to identify the message (i.e. from email address or email domain, subject line keywords) and then tell it where to put the emails that match. 

You’ll see that you can also have an alert pop up or play a specific sound based upon the same criteria.

Flag a Message for Follow Up

Have you ever looked through your inbox and found an old message that you meant to follow up on but had completely forgotten about? A flag rule can ensure that doesn’t’ happen again by reminding you about it. 

Click Message > Follow Up

Then choose when you’d like to receive the reminder alert. You can use the Custom dialog box to create a custom description of the follow up action, such as “Check to see if contract has been sent back.” 

You can set flags both for your own messages and for recipients of your messages that also use Outlook. 

Use Quick Steps to Automate Multiple Actions

If you take multiple actions on specific emails, such as forwarding them to a particular department, moving them to a folder, and flagging them for later follow up, Outlook’s Quick Steps can do all those tasks for you.

You can create your own Quick Steps and use some of the template default actions, like:

·      Move a message to a folder and mark as read

·      Move a message to a folder, mark as complete, and mark as read

·      Forward the email to another person

·      Forward the email to multiple people

·      Open a reply window and delete the initial message 

You can access this area in the Home panel, Quick Steps group. 

Apply Categories to Your Messages 

Color-coded categories in Outlook is another way to help organize messages and quickly identify where they fall in your workflow. For example, you might put all invoicing related emails in a “green” category and all immediate problem related ones in a “red” category. 

Once you set up your categories in Outlook, they can be applied automatically by creating a rule. 

You’ll first set up a condition, which can be the importance marked on the email, the email sender, or any other standard parameter. Then you can add in the action to assign it to a specific category. This can also be one of multiple actions set up in Quick Steps.

Are You Fully Utilizing Your Office Applications? 

Often companies are already using great applications, but they’re not using them to their fullest. Brain Stomp can go through a full streamlining of your workflows using the tools you already have to help you get the most out of them. 

Schedule a free office optimization consultation today! Call 260-918-3548 or reach out online.