Elevate Your Workflow - Day-to-day Game Changers (Part II)

What a great summer it has been. This time of the year offers us an opportunity to implement new systems and routines as we manage not just our work but also our time outside of work. We thought it would be a perfect time to take a deeper dive on the day-to-day game changers that we wrote about last year.

For this edition of NEWS YOU CAN USE, we’re taking a deeper dive into all things email and how you can supercharge your productivity with no additional cost.

If you’re like us, you may be receiving many emails throughout your day, whether it’s meeting summaries, project emails, app notifications, or newsletters. Leaving this unchecked quickly creates an overwhelming amount of emails. . .

. . .Until today.

You may have heard of email rules, but today we want to discuss ways to use them more strategically. With the focus of this newsletter on Microsoft Outlook, check out these ideas to boost your productivity.

Move Messages from Specific Senders to Specific Folders

This works great for immediately moving newsletters to specific folders for review later. To set up a rule like this, do the following:

1. Navigate to the Email rule settings.

For the Outlook client itself, it may look like this:

In the web version of Outlook, it may look like this:

1. From there, decide how you want to set up the rules. For more specific outcomes, you can specify the rule to trigger from specific senders. If you know the exact email addresses of the senders for specific newsletters, this is a great way to make sure those specific emails go to a specific folder.

Hot Tip: Segment your email folders, so specific newsletters of certain topics will show up in the same folder together while other topics are in other folders. This introduces automation as well as organization at the same time. Why create a mess of emails in one folder when you can make the rules organize your emails as well?

Let’s move on to another type of email rule.

Move Messages with General Conditions

This rule works great if you don’t know the exact sender addresses, or there could simply be too many. Where might this apply?

Ever been on a business trip? Expense reports can be a pain when tracking the receipts. Well, you can track these things much easier from various vendors by setting up a more generic email rule to capture and move them to a specific folder. This type of rule does require a little research and refining.

1. Create an email rule in much the same way as the first one we went over.
2. For a dedicated receipts folder, what typically seems to work well is to select the “Subject or body includes” as the condition with words such as “receipt,” “order,” or “confirmation” as the words for it to look for. This will likely capture receipts from most ride share apps, restaurants, and more because it’s looking for those words in either the subject line itself or in the message body.

Hot tip: Add an additional action. Maybe your email workflow is set up so emails are not automatically changed to “read” when you click on them. For messages like receipts, you could make an exception there and additionally mark the messages as “read” once moved to a folder.

What are other ways you could use this more “general” conditional?

How about meeting invites?

Handle Meeting Invites & Events

Here’s what an email rule could look like if you want all your incoming meeting invites to be marked with high importance and colored a certain way on your calendar. For meetings, you’ll want the trigger to be that the message is an “invitation” for that to work.

What if the message is not an invite, but it might be a webinar or event you might be interested in? You could set up a general conditional email rule here too. This may require a bit of finessing later, so be sure to utilize the “exceptions” part of the rule if you find some messages somehow being treated as an event when they aren’t.

Handling Summaries

What if the day slipped by and you want to review just the summaries? If you utilize any apps like Read AI, Asana, and more, you may be receiving emails with summaries. You can do a similar email rule with either specific emails or with general conditional. Note with the general conditional that you may have a higher chance of the rule working with emails you did not intend it to work with. You can mitigate that issue with the use of categories.

Handling Messages with Multiple Categories

What’s nice about categories is that a message can be categorized in multiple ways. Let’s say, for instance, you have several email rules for newsletters where you not only move messages to specific folders, but you also categorize them a certain way with a color. Some of those newsletters may have free downloads or e-books within them that you may be interested in. A separate rule could handle the category assignment for the e-book part. Running both rules categorizes the message in two different ways.

In this case, the message was moved to a certain folder and was categorized as both a newsletter and a message with a free download of some sort. Not only does this visually make the message stand out from other messages, Microsoft Outlook lets you organize and review your emails by categories. This allows for quicker processing because you aren’t trying to switch gears between reviewing different types of messages. Newsletters can quickly turn into rabbit holes, and before you know it, it’s already late in the day. Categories can become a game changer in only reviewing messages of certain types at times that make sense.

Conclusion

We went over quite a few ideas for email rules that can take care of the heavy lifting in email processing in this edition of NEWS YOU CAN USE. One thing we do want to note in setting up these rules is that some rules may be Client-Only rules and depend on Outlook being open for them to work. This could be problematic if you don’t have Outlook open due to being out-of-office, etc. To minimize this as much as possible, look into Server-side rules if you are using Microsoft Exchange (Woodgate, 2018). Many of the examples here were shown using the online web Outlook instead of directly within the Outlook client itself.

Cited Sources:

Woodgate, R. (2018, October 10). How to create server-side rules in outlook. How to Geek. https://www.howtogeek.com/367955/how-to-create-server-side-rules-in-outlook/