Introduction
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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.
Let's not waste any more time and jump into tip number one.
Turn off sounds and alerts in Outlook
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 workday.
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.
Send an email at a later time in Outlook
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 to show you another feature which I think is very underutilized.
Save clicks with Quick Steps in Outlook
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 creating and modifying rules here within Outlook.
Create Outlook rules to save time
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 rule.
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 keyword 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 desktop 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.
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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.
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description below.
Now, next on our list we wanna look at sharing some information with people when it comes to our Outlook calendar.
Share your Outlook calendar in an email
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 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 gonna be availability only, and I would assume that nine times out of ten, 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 to 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, 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 stage, 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.
Convert any email into an Outlook 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.
Add multiple time zones to the Outlook calendar
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 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.