The email inbox, either it is your place of zen and an aid to you getting your work done, or it is a distracting mire of half finished conversations, adhoc “to dos” and interuptions, and this can escalate to a point at which that simple email folder can be your most hated work location.
How can you change your attitude about your inbox from the latter to the former?
Outlook has quite a few features to help with general clutter in your inbox, from the Junkmail folder helping you keep absolute , well Junk, out of the way, and the feature to split your inbox into “focued” and “other” views and the long-present ability to file into folders and add coloured catagorising to your emails.
But today we are going to go a little further, and look at “quick steps” which can help you quickly perform several actions on an email (or group of emails) in just 1 click or with a shortcut key. I will apply some of the methodologies I use in my own mailbox for the examples, but dont feel like they are the be all and end all of quicksteps, or methodologies that you can apply to emails, instead view it as a useful starting point to help you develop the system you want to use with your emails. I hope you find them as useful as I have.
Want to set up the system we investigate here? or use it as a starting point? dont worry about watching, re-watching and pausing the video for the details, here are some bullet points to give you those details.
In “Microsoft ToDo”:-
Open settings – connected apps – enable flagged email
In “Microsoft Outlook”:-
Make 4 folders:-
“complete / No Action”
“Action”
“Follow up”
“Read Later”
Create Quicksteps:-
1 “no action”
Set Shortcut to CTRL+Shift+1
Mark email as read
Clear Flag Status
Move email to Folder “Complete / No action”
2 “today”
Set Shortcut to CTRL+Shift+2
Mark email as unread
Set Flag Status “today”
Move email to Folder “Action”
3 “tomorrow”
Set Shortcut to CTRL+Shift+3
Mark email as unread
Set Flag Status “tomorrow”
Move email to Folder “Action”
4 “this week”
Set Shortcut to CTRL+Shift+4
Mark email as unread
Set Flag Status “this week”
Move email to Folder “Action”
5 “Next week”
Set Shortcut to CTRL+Shift+5
Mark email as unread
Set Flag Status “next week”
Move email to Folder “Action”
6 “Follow up”
Set Shortcut to CTRL+Shift+6
Mark email as unread
Set Flag Status “next week”
Move email to Folder “Follow up”
Set Category “Follow Up”
7 “Read”
Set Shortcut to CTRL+Shift+7
Mark email as unread
Move email to Folder “Read”
9 “Create Appointment with attachment”
Set Shortcut to CTRL+Shift+9
Create appointment with attachment
Mark email as read
Move email to Folder “Read”
Summary
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