In order for you to work at your productive best, you need to be able to ignore certain things so you can focus on your most important work. And although email is a necessity as a part of our business world, we need to be able to ignore email from time to time.
However, that can be difficult when you have email desktop alerts turned on. So today I want to show you how to turn your desktop alerts off and also set up some custom rules so that you don't miss messages from particular senders or those that may be of high importance.
What are Outlook Alerts
Now, this video is particular to Microsoft Outlook users. If you are a user of Microsoft Outlook, you're probably very familiar with email desktop alerts.
They usually appear in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen, and they give you a brief summary of that new email which has just arrived. It will show you the sender, the subject line, the first few words or the first few sentences of that message, and the date and time that it arrived.
Now, I'm not exactly sure why it includes the date and time because these notifications arrive immediately as soon as that message arrives. And they can be so distracting, pulling you away from other work or other things that you were engaged in at that moment.
They don't just appear when you have Outlook open as the active window. As long as you have Outlook running, even if it's minimized in your taskbar, these messages will continue to pop up, distract you, and pull you away from your most important work.
So how do we go about turning these distracting notifications off? Well, let's jump into Outlook and see where we need to go.
How to Turn Off Outlook Alerts
In order for you to turn off your notifications that appear in the bottom right-hand corner, we want to start by selecting file. At the very bottom, just above exit, is options.
Let's select options, and that's going to give us a whole lot of options. Right near the top is mail, so let's select mail.
About halfway down this screen, you shouldn't have to scroll. You will see the section heading called message arrival.
By default, Microsoft usually has all of these turned on: when new messages arrive, play a sound, briefly change the mouse pointer, show an envelope icon in the taskbar, and display a desktop alert. I don't think you need any of these notifications for new email, so I strongly encourage you to uncheck all of them.
Especially play a sound. You don't need an audible sound for every email that comes in, and of course, this last one, displaying a desktop alert, we do not want to see these interruptions for every single message.
Whether it's something important, a message from your boss, or something that is spam, remember it doesn't filter out anything. Every single message will pop up there in the lower right-hand corner, so we want to turn all of them off.
How to Create a Rule
Now, I'm sure some of you are thinking, well, wait a minute, Scott. Once in a while, that notification has been helpful. Once in a while, I have received an important message, and I was able to act upon it because it showed up here.
Well, I'm going to show you how to create a rule for specific senders or for those which have been flagged as high important so that they can still appear and notify you, yet you won't receive notifications for every single message.
Let's start with a particular sender. For many people, they don't want to miss a message from their boss, perhaps a superior, maybe a very important client, or maybe it could be a spouse or a significant other.
The easiest way to create a rule for that individual is to find an email that they have sent to you. So I'm going to select this one as an example.
We can either select rules up here at the top in the ribbon, or we can right-click and select rules. They will both get us to the same place, and we are going to select create a rule.
This is someone that we want to be notified when their emails arrive. So I'm going to select create a rule, and it's going to show us this dialog here.
Nothing is checked so far. The way that this dialog works is that it gives us sort of an if this, then do that scenario.
So when I get an email with all the selected conditions, we're going to make that selection here, do the following. I'm going to tell it what to do here.
In this case, when I get an email with all the selected conditions, I'm going to select from this person. That's the only thing I'm going to check is from this individual.
What I want it to do is to display in the new item alert window, so I'm going to select that checkbox and select ok. Now it's gonna give us a brief warning saying that this rule is a client-only rule, and what that means is that this is only going to apply when Outlook is running.
Which is fine, the desktop notifications that we just turned off were the same thing. They were only going to show up when Outlook is running.
So we're gonna say ok, and now whenever I receive a message from this particular sender, I'm going to get a notification. It's gonna look a little bit different than the one we saw here, but it's gonna show up right in the middle of our screen in a new dialog box telling us that we've got a message from that individual.
So you can do this for as many senders as you like, but I would encourage you to keep it to a small number, probably no more than 4 or 5. Think of the four or five people that you really want to see their message every single time they send you something.
I'm hoping that's a relatively small number. The rest you can come and deal with their messages as you go through email throughout the day or throughout set times that you make time with email.
But these are just your extra important people that you want to receive that notification when they send you an email. Now there's a second circumstance in which you may wish to receive a notification immediately, and that's if someone sends you a message marked high importance.
Those are messages with those little red exclamation marks on them in Outlook. In this situation, we're gonna select rules up above, and instead of selecting create rule, we're gonna select manage rules and alerts.
This is an easier way to get to the new rule section. We're gonna start a rule from scratch down below.
We can see the one that we just created, right? These are the new item alert window alert for this particular sender, and as we add more people, they will show here as well.
So we can add or remove people if we like, but this time we want to select a new rule. Now this may look a little busy, it may look a little intimidating, but it's actually much easier than you may think.
The one we want to select is in the middle under stay up to date. We want to select display mail from someone in the new item alert window. That is what type of rule we are setting up.
In the next screen, if we click next at the bottom, we get to say, well, which conditions do you want to check? By default, they select from people or public group.
This is so you can choose a particular individual, kind of like what we did in that first rule. We're going to uncheck that because the condition that we want this time around is marked as importance.
That's the one we want to have checked. But before we move on, we have to make one more step in it and actually click on the importance link.
The reason is that there are three different levels of importance. There is normal, which is just your standard email. There is low importance that I find not a lot of people use, and then there's high importance.
This is the one with the red exclamation mark, so you want to make sure you select high importance level and then select ok. You can read the description of the rule down below as we go along.
Apply this rule after the message arrives marked as high importance. Let's select next once again.
It gives us the option as to, well, what do we want to do? Do we want to move it, do we want to redirect it, do we want to play a sound?
You can make additional options here. What I suggest is just having just the first one display a specific message in the new item alert window.
If we select that link, we can say, you know what we want to call this? I'm just gonna call it high importance.
You can put my own exclamation mark on it if I like. So that's just gonna show up in the dialog box when this message arrives.
I'm gonna select ok. We are gonna select the next button.
It's gonna ask us, are there any exceptions? In most cases, there is not going to be any exception, so we'll leave everything here unchecked.
On this screen, we're gonna select next. We can give it a specific name if we like.
I'm just going to leave it at high importance. Turn on this rule should be checked by default, and then we select finish.
Now once again, we are going to receive a warning saying that this rule will only run when you check your email in Outlook. That's fine.
We only want this rule to run when Outlook is open, either in the background or if we actually have it as the active window. So we'll select ok, and now you see we have that rule added here.
Going forward, every email from this particular sender, and if I add other people, that will show up as a new desktop alert. Every single email, regardless of who sends it, any email that comes in with a high importance label on it will show up in front of me as well.
Those are maybe the only two or three circumstances that I want. You can think of other rules or other situations in which you may want an email to show up.
But please, in order for you to reduce the amount of distractions in your
day-to-day, turn off your desktop notifications for every single email and instead create a few rules for just those important people or those important situations. I hope that has helped you out, and I wish you a very productive day.
If you would like to learn more about how you can stay productive, particularly when it comes to email, I would encourage you to like, subscribe, and comment below. What are some of your biggest distractions when it comes to working with your computer or working with your email application?
If you haven't visited Simpletivity.com, I would encourage you to do so. You will find many more tips and techniques to help you work at your productive best.
Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
