- This video is brought to you by SaneBox. Stay tuned to learn more
about how SaneBox can help you keep a decluttered inbox. Are you wanting to save time
when using Microsoft outlook well then this video is for you because I'm sharing with
you seven of my best time-saving tips right here within outlook and let's don't waste any more time and jump into tip number one. And that has to do with turning off all of those alerts and
visual notifications, so we're a lot less distracted
when dealing with our email. What we wanna do is come
up here and select file and then come all the way
down and select options. Now that's gonna open up
our outlook options dialog, but second, we need to
come over here to mail and near the bottom of the screen you may need to scroll
down just a little bit. We've got a subheader
called message arrival. Now by default, outlook is
gonna have all of these things checked and turned on, which
only makes our life that much more distracting as we're trying to get on with other things, especially
if we have outlook open while we have other applications or maybe even other monitors open as we go about our work day. So we can uncheck play a
sound, very, very distracting. We can uncheck briefly
change the mouse pointer. So even if you're doing
something in an Excel spreadsheet for example, you're not
distracted by your mouse changing midway through editing
a cell or writing a report notifying you of a new message. We can uncheck show an
envelope icon in the task bar but maybe the most distracting one in this list of them all is the last one, display a desktop alert and
you know exactly what I mean. In the lower right-hand corner, you get a little preview of
both the subject, the sender and maybe the first two
sentences of that message for every single email. I strongly encourage you
to uncheck this one as well so that you can regain your focus. The second tip I have
for you today has to do with delaying the delivery
of an email message. So let me come up here and
just open up a new email. I'm just gonna type in a default or a test email address here and
let's just call this a Test Delay here as our subject line. So maybe you don't want someone knowing that you were actually writing that email at three in the morning. However you wanna use
this feature is up to you but let me show you how to execute on it. So let's say I finished crafting and writing this email, next
up I want to tell outlook when to send it. What we need to do is
come up here to options and then over to the right
under the more options area, we have an option called delay delivery. Now, if we select this, we're
gonna actually have a number of other properties show up. But all we wanna focus
on here is down here, these delivery options. So when we select the
delayed delivery option from the ribbon, this is
already going be checked here, the do not deliver before and then we can choose
the date and time options. Now I've noticed by default,
it's gonna choose today at 5:00 PM as the default
delayed delivery time. But of course we can choose any date and time that we want. Here I can come to my mini calendar and I can say, you know what,
I'd rather have this go out on Wednesday morning. That's when I hope this person, I want them to see it
or open up this message. I'm gonna say 9:00 AM
on Wednesday morning. We can say close at this
stage, and you're not gonna see anything different
on the message itself. We can still go ahead and edit and change the subject or the message itself. But at this point I'm gonna hit send but it didn't actually send. In fact, all it did was
send it to my outbox. Let's see what that looks like. Here on the left-hand side of my menu, I can come down here
and click on my outbox. I can see that there's
one message in there. This is the one we just
created called Test Delay. And over here, it's gonna
say that it was sent at Monday at 10:40 which
happens to be just now or just a moment ago. Now it wasn't actually sent, that's actually telling us
when I hit the send button but the reason why it's
in the outbox area here, is because it's waiting
for that delay time. It's waiting for that Wednesday time. If I want to I can open
this up and remove the delay and send it right away or
change the delay settings. But you can always go back to your outbox, If there's something that
has not been sent yet, a very handy feature if you
want a message to arrive at a particular time. Let's go back to our
inbox and I want show you another feature which I
think is very underutilized, even though it may have been staring at you in your face for many, many years. Here in the middle of the ribbon, we have a section called Quick Steps. Now, Quick Steps is nothing new. It's been around in outlook
for many, many years but in my experience, very
few people actually use it. And number two, actually don't
even know what its purpose is or how to use it. So by default Microsoft is going give us a few different preloaded
Quick Steps for us to try and make our lives that much easier. The best way to think
about Quick Steps is it allows you to customize
some automated steps or multiple steps even though
you're only going to click one particular action. So to create your own all you
need to do is come down here to select, create new, and we're gonna get this dialogue here. So I'm gonna say a New Quick Step. In this case you can give it a
name, anything that you want, you can even choose your own
icon here to make it stand out from other such things. I'm just gonna choose this one for fun. So it stands out from everything else. And next, what we get to do
is choose all of the actions we want to apply. So by selecting this dropdown,
we can file things away change the status, add
or remove categories, different responses that we have here. We can even do things
related to our calendar. So for example, maybe I want to move it to a particular folder and here I can choose which
folder I want to move it to. But I don't wanna stop there,
I also wanna come down here and flag that particular message and I can choose which flag it is. I'm gonna say tomorrow,
perhaps in this case. I can come down here and add
yet another action as well. I can say let's also mark it as unread. So I come back to it at that time and it stands out from everything else. So again, you can stack and
layer all of these actions but only select one
button to execute them. Now, next up on our
list, I wanna talk about about creating and modifying
rules here within outlook. Now the rule section is right over from the Quick Step ribbon by default. So here we can select rules and we can either apply a rule to the message that we are currently
selected on at the moment. Or we can select create a rule. Now you can create some very
very sophisticated rules here within outlook. By default, it's going to include some of the information on the message, if you happen to have a
message selected at the moment. But you can see that all of
these boxes are unchecked. So I don't have to apply
the from Wayfair option to this particular message. But here's where you get
to set the conditions or the criteria for this role. So do you want to either
flag or send certain messages from a particular sender somewhere else? Maybe you want to seek out
messages that have a particular key word in the subject
line or who it was sent to. And then we can tell it what to do. Now, this is the one I wanted
to highlight to display in the new item, alert window. This is where you can turn
off your desk top alerts. Remember that distracting window in the bottom right-hand corner, and you can create your own custom ones for those that are coming
from a particular sender or that meet your particular conditions. Now we can always come back up to rules here and select
manage rules and alerts. If we wanna review all of
the rules that we've created or maybe need to modify them or just delete them altogether. So make sure you know how to get to this screen so you can
make changes in the future. Now, if you don't wanna
spend your time creating all of these complicated rules,
for different folders and different places to send your messages then you may benefit from SaneBox. SaneBox is the artificial
intelligence to help you sift through a large quantity of
messages in a matter of seconds. And the great thing is because SaneBox uses
artificial intelligence it actually learns from your behavior. So as you drag more of
your promotional material or emails from a certain
sender into a particular folder it starts to learn from you and we'll apply that automatically without having to apply all
of these complicated rules. If you would like to
try SaneBox for yourself and receive a special discount
for a Simpletivity viewers, be sure to click the link
in the description below. Now, next on our list we
wanna look at sharing some information with people
when it comes to our outlook calendar. How many times have you
wanted to set up a meeting with someone outside of your organization? Someone who doesn't have
access to your shared calendar but you still want to tell
them when you're busy or free in the next couple of days. Well outlook actually makes
it quite easy for us to do so. Let's start a new email here again. And I don't even have to
fill in any way information to get things rolling with this feature. In this case, what I wanna
do is I wanna give a summary of the times that I'm
available for the coming week. So all I need to do here
is come down to the body of my message and I'll probably start off by saying something like please
take a look at the following dates or times. But next I wanna come up here
to insert and under insert, I'm gonna say calendar. This is gonna pop up a short dialogue which only gives us a few
important but critical choices. First we need to select
which is our calendar. Which calendar we actually want to share. And by default it's probably
your main calendar here within Microsoft. Next up, how far out do you
want to share this calendar? You can start with only today
or you can select tomorrow, a few other defaults or you can specify a few particular dates. In this case, I'm gonna
select the next seven days. And it's even gonna give
me a summary down below as to which dates are going to appear. Next up we get to choose
the level of detail that we want to share with the
person we're sending this to. Now by default it's going
be availability only And I would assume that
nine times out of 10 this is exactly what you want to share because it's gonna limit
it to just free, busy, tentative types of information. No names of events or
appointments are going be shown. No attendees or invitees
are going to be shown either but it does give us a few other options including limited details,
which will include the subject of those calendar events,
but also full details which will include the invitees as well. So like I said, by, in most cases, you're probably only going to want
to show the availability only. Now, if you have set your working
hours here within outlook, I would also encourage you
to select this checkbox show time within my working hours only because you don't want someone to assume that you're available late in the evening, if those don't include your working hours. At this case I'm gonna select okay and what's gonna happen is
it's gonna embed this sort of miniature calendar into
the body of the email. So what they can do is scroll down through this mini calendar. And as you can see, it's only showing free and busy information, no specific details. So they can come down and say, oh, I wanted to meet on the 25th but it looks like you're busy all day. Let's meet on the 26th at about 10:00 am. It looks like you're free, let's set up a meeting for that time. So for very quick and easy way to include your calendar information
even for those who are outside of your organization. Let's stick with our
calendar for just a moment and see how we can easily
convert any email message into a calendar event. Now, first and foremost, why
might you want to do this? Well, I think there's
two important reasons. Maybe you've already been going
back and forth with someone and now you need to set up a meeting and you wanna keep all that
information that you had in that email. So you want to quickly convert it into an actual meeting appointment. The second reason would be if you're using a concept
like time-blocking and you wanna just reserve
some time to maybe address or go deeper or respond to a particularly messy
or important email. So in order to do so all you need to do is select that email. We want to click and hold. We're gonna click and drag. And what we want to do is
come down to our calendar icon and then release by releasing it there it's gonna open up our
appointment dialogue. No, we are not replying at this stage, we are now creating a
calendar appointment. Now outlook is automatically
gonna convert the subject of the email into the
title of the appointment. And down below, you can see the
entire email is now included within this appointment as well. So the first thing that you might wanna do is change the subject, right? To something a little more
meaningful for yourself or for whoever else is going
to be included on this. And you can still add further details above the email contents itself. So whether you're actually
inviting others or not a very quick and easy way to do so. Next let's go into our
calendar itself and show you how you can add additional
time zones to your calendar. For most of us, we are
not limited to a very specific geographic area
or only one time time zone. You are most likely working with others and also have clients in a
variety of different time zones. So wouldn't it be helpful if
you may be highlighted one or even two additional time zones, so you don't always have to
be doing that mental math. For example, I am here on
the Pacific West Coast. So I have the Pacific time
zone here listed on my calendar but many of my clients
are on the East Coast. So I would like to see
exactly what their time is rather than always having to
add three hours every time I'm trying to plan a meeting. So in this case, we can get to
this area in one of two ways. Let me show you the long way and we'll shorten it up a little bit. Once again, we can go up to
file, then down to options, and then this time we
wanna come down to calendar and we're still gonna have
to scroll a little bit to get to this time zone area. But that was an awful lot of clicks. Let's see if we can speed
that up a little bit. Here within our calendar
view we can select the view option here and
then under arrangement, we wanna select calendar options and that's gonna take us
directly to calendar options within this dialogue. We're still gonna have to
scroll down just a little bit before we get to this time zone area. So for your default time zone you can choose the default
label to whatever you like but we can add both a second
and a third time zone. By selecting this checkbox
I have now added the Eastern time zone and I can
either call it East or Eastern or EST, whatever I want,
whatever makes sense to me. At the very end, don't
forget to select okay and now you will see I've got the Eastern time zone selected here,
right beside my default Pacific time zone. So quick and easy can help you as you're setting up meetings with others.
