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How to become extremely fast to process emails and tasks using Outlook

Have you ever felt like you’re spending hours of your day doing the fireman in your Outlook mailbox, and you’re not doing any of your work? You’re not alone.

Many people have experienced this, including me. At some point I had to go through lots of emails, perceiving them all as important. I wanted to take action and respond immediately to their sender. In fact, it was counterproductive. People would get the slow response from me. I was spending my days in the mailbox and it affected negatively my performance. I would get stressed, spend long hours at the office, not progressing towards my objectives.

The good news is, you can master your mailbox and make it a weapon to increase your overall performance when managing your tasks. I will show you how. And despite what you will hear from fancy app making companies, you do NOT need ultra-sophisticated software to make miracles with your productivity! And not a complex system. Simple rules and the good old Outlook in its recent versions.

Outlook and only Outlook

Outlook is present on most of the desktops in today’s businesses. Very useful functions are implemented such as quick-actions, flags, colored categories, as well as a powerful search engine built in the app. And your email app is available with you wherever you go on your desktop or mobile.

Using many apps to manage tasks across your work laptop, mobile, calendar, paper notebook is a difficult mission. Less is more. We will only use Outlook to manage all your tasks/emails. In fact, you can use any other email app and will be able to do 95% of what we are achieving with Outlook.

Using one system is key. All tasks will be unloaded from your brain, paper notebook, or incoming email. You will never stress about forgetting to send this important report to your boss again.

Farwell old habits, hello to the new workflow

In order to improve your effectiveness and efficiency, you need to have a simple yet robust system to handle your emails and tasks in general. And unlearn whatever you have done until now:

Implement the tool step by step

Setting-up the system consists of creating specific mailboxes and setting up flags to prioritize actions. It should not take you more than a few minutes.

 

Your inbox with new mailboxes

The follow-up section should look something like this.

Your Quick Steps panel should now look like this.

 

 

Implement the workflow step by step

Once you have the mailboxes and set-up complete, you can proceed with implementing the routine.

Once, twice or maximum 3 times a day

Once or twice a week

– Do a check of all pending actions and ask yourself: are they making me closer to my overall goal?
– Review Follow-up Flag of each action, and determine whether you should put more or less priority to each action. Change the flags accordingly.

Initialize the mailbox for the first time

During the first utilization; you will probably have a lot of folders that you used for filing. I suggest using the Quick Action “Completed” on all emails unless they are an outstanding task. In a few minutes, you will be able to empty and delete all folders that you used for filing. Your mailbox will be much cleaner and leaner. Fewer mailboxes mean fewer reasons to stress.

The Trap of old habits

From personal experience, you need to decide dedicated times to go through your inbox in the morning and afternoon and not more.

At first, it will be difficult to focus on the tasks in the “Now”. You will be tempted to go through the email list as per old habits and do whatever you see.

To maximize your productivity, you can use the Pomodoro technique, or simply group your action completion is one block of time while constraining yourself to a short time (e.g. 25min). If you are interrupted all the time by phone, people talking to you, or stop while doing a task, you reduce highly the benefits of the routine. I will cover this aspect in another article.

After a few days of discipline, you will quickly develop this new habit, and wonder why you didn’t do that before, and why you lost so much time filing email.

Next steps

The system I present here is a simple adaptation of the one presented in the book Getting Things Done (by David Allen), or its adaptation called The Secret Weapon. You have the possibility to integrate the Outlook system with the Evernote, OneNote or other taking notes apps. I personally manage my personal tasks directly in Evernote and corporate tasks in Outlook.

If you have any suggestion, questions or comments about some points, do not hesitate to leave a message in the comment section below.

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Disclosure: This post may contain affiliate links. That means I may make a small commission (at no cost to you) if you make a purchase. This will help to support theleanfox.com!

 

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