Best way to orgainze your Outlook Inbox | Tutorial Part 01

email how many of you have got a bulging inbox with hundreds if not thousands of emails sitting in there i bet you've got emails in that inbox that your remark is unread because you know you need to come back to them later on and take some action but you don't want to lose them amongst the pile every day multiple times a day you scroll up and down your inbox looking at those emails and they trigger anxiety every time you see one you haven't taken any action on yet or you might be sat watching this feeling pretty smug with yourself because you keep your emails organized in little subfolders in your inbox one for each person in your team all 35 of them every day you go through your inbox and drag each one of your emails into those folders what if i told you there was another way to automatically file your emails create tasks and even meetings from those emails right within outlook and even reach the holy grail of inbox zero let me show you how in this month's tuesday tech tip a few years ago i purchased a book that changed the way i work and got me for the first time ever to inbox zero not only that it helped me to focus on the really important tasks and cut through the smoke screen of information overload the book's called smart work by dermot crowley and i highly recommend it in the book he talks about your email inbox being just like your letterbox at home every day letters are posted through but you don't just leave them there to pile up on the doormat you do something with them well it's just the same with your email you need to do something with them we're either going to delete them file them save them to read later or take action on them and without looks quick step feature you can process your emails in next to no time here's how we do it okay so you need to open up the desktop version of outlook for the tricks i'm going to show you in this video won't work with the web version of outlook and it won't work with a mac version of outlook it's only the desktop pc version that we'll be able to use for the tricks i'm going to show you so once you've got it open you've got your inbox with your emails sitting in there and like we said before your inbox is like your letterbox at home you wouldn't just leave your letters piling up on the doorstep you're going to do something with those emails you're either going to delete them file them for later file them to read or take some other kind of action on them so first off we need somewhere to put these emails they need somewhere to live so to do that we go over to the inbox we right click and we create a new folder and the first one we're going to call filing and then we're going to do it again right click and we're going to create a new folder and we call it reading and really they're the only two folders that you need i know that some of you will have folders all the way down the side here with different people's names or different projects that you're working on that you drop your emails into don't worry about this for now we're going to come on to that later but this is the way we're going to get you to inbox zero okay so now we've got the folders in there you could click and drag them in so we've got some things from the test that i would like to read later we've got an ed surge uh newsletter and we've got emails from different people they're all from me because they've since myself but we've got different projects in there so instead of just taking them and dragging them into the reading folder which will take ages especially if you've got you know a thousand unread emails what you can do instead is use this quick step tool here so quick steps help you to automate some of the tasks that you would do by hand so what we're gonna do straight away is create new and the first one we're gonna do is we're gonna call it filing and this is where all of the emails that we want to drop into this filing folder we can just click a button to do that so we call it filing and the action that we want is for it to move to a folder and the folder that we want it to move to is filing and we can click finish then we're going to create another quick step so again we create new and this one is reading and again we're going to move it to a specific folder and the folder is reading and then we click finish so i'm going to show you that in action to start with so the test emails that we get i want to save to reading so what i do now instead of clicking it and dragging it and dropping it into reading like this i select the email and i can just click the reading button there and it will file it straight into reading and the ed surge can go into reading and the tests and the ed surge and i'm just keep clicking it and it sends sends it straight into there now when it gets to this one this is kind of like a some updates to tests and things i'm just going to delete those ones i'm not really interested in that so i click delete and then edit search can go back into reading so if i've got an email that i need to do something with later or i want to come back to again there's something that i need to refer to that i need to keep filed then i want to put that into my filing folder so here i've got mark dixon an email from myself to myself and i can just click the filing button and now that will go into the file i'll do that one with that one as well so if you look here in the filing folder you can see those two emails that i've put in and if we go into reading we've got the emails that uh i've put in there to read later and i've got the ones that are unread so i know they're the ones that i want to go to probably first so we go back to our inbox now so that's two ways that we can file our email straight away we can put them into filing and we can put them into reading but to take it to the next level we now need to create some actions that we can do with those emails so you might get an email in that you need to then create a meeting from or some tasks so if we take this email here mark next steps could you get back to me by friday with the following information so that could be a typical email that you would get so really this wants to be a calendar event so what we do now is we go to create new we're going to call this file and calendar so what we want the email to do is go it automatically go into our filing but also set up a calendar event a meeting or something like that so we go to choose an action and this time we scroll down and we choose create an appointment with the text in the message so we're going to click that and then we're going to add another action and the other action is to move it to filing so what's going to happen is we're going to click the button it's going to put the email into our filing so we can always find the email later but it's also going to create a calendar event and it's going to use the text of the body of the email within that culinary event so we can click finish there and i'll show you in action so now we've got this button here we've got file and calendar we've got filing over here reading filing calendar so we just click the file in calendar and bang that email has now gone into our filing and we've got here the meeting request or an appointment so the subject is next steps because that was the subject of the email we've got a location it gives us the information that was within that email so you're not going to lose any of that information you know you don't have to try and find the email paste it in or when it comes time to the actual for the actual appointment you've got all the information ready for it so what we would then need to do in here is to add the date so we want it it's by friday so let's say thursday we'll make the deadline and we're going to do it for eight o'clock in the morning and there we go we can save and close so now the email has been saved into our filing if we go into here we've got the email here so we're never going to lose that and we've created our calendar event just here so that's great now your last uh quick step that we're going to set up is to create a task so we've got an email that we want to take some quick action on and it's not something that's going to be set to a deadline maybe which would be more useful as a calendar event so this time we're going to again go to create new this time it's going to be file and task choose the action so we'll move to folder first of all because we know we want it to go to the file in folder then we create another action use a drop down and we're going to create a task and we can create a task with an attachment or create a task with the text of the message i'm going to go for the text of the message in this instance i can always find the email later when i need to anyway so create a task with it with a text of a message so it's going to file it's going to create the task looking quick click finish there and this time i want to take some action on this email here so i click the file and task quick step straight away it's gone into my filing which is good so it's safe it's got the text there so update project three so this might actually be tasks for project three i can decide when i'm gonna do it so instead of creating a due date instead of just working on a deadline when it's due we tend to leave these things until the ends until they become really really urgent instead of leaving them until they get urgent it's better to actually plan your time around when you're going to start these tasks not when they're due to be finished so i'm going to start this task today so it's gonna start today it's the due date i'm not worried about and then i can add here some of the details so start with task two get feedback before starting task three okay and that'll do for that so we can save and close there brilliant so if i go back into my filing again you can see i've got the the project email that we've just created and if i go into my tasks i've got a task for today that we've just put in with the body of the email so i know what it's relating to as well which makes it really useful so there you go that's how to use your outlook more effectively to keep yourself organized and i'll see you next month for another tuesday tech tip

Channel: Digital Learning Consultant

Views: 152,830

Keywords: Outlook quick steps tutorial, quick steps, quicksteps, productivity, education, how to learn, studying, email productivity hacks, email productivity, inbox, inbox zero, email tips, email hacks, email processing, process email, email apps, outlook tutorial, how to use outlook, email rules, distraction, productive, task management, to do list, archive

Id: biGiVC1FUtM

Length: 10min 14sec (614 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 28 2020