You are the master of your Inbox, but that will not get you where you want be. Then what will?

I bet 80% of all books, blog posts, articles, and trainings around productivity and time management is all about mastering your mail, controlling your Inbox, and make sure you manage the work assigned to you through mail in efficient way. However, this will not help you to reach your objectives, but help others to reach theirs ….

The whole point of reducing the time spent on managing mail more efficiently is to free up time to work on your objectives, so you can get better results, as well as  achieve a balance between performing well at work, while still having time and energy left to other important areas of your life, such as family, friends, and your self.

What is important to you? How is your work measured, what does success look like?
If you don’t define this, and make a plan for  how to achieve it, how will you get there?

Outlook will not help you to define the goals in your life, but it can help you to manage how to get there. See the following posts if you would like to see how:

Are you prioritizing work that leads to results? Outlook can help you stay focused

Get out of your Inbox! Work towards Your agenda and goals, not others.

The easy way manage your small personal- and work-projects with the tools you already have on your PC, iPad, and phone.

If you have followed this blog for a while, you know I am a fan of using Outlook tasks. However, what do you do if you have a lot of different activities linked together that form a project? I am not talking about the big projects where you would use Microsoft Project or other professional tools, but the small everyday projects at home, like arranging a birthday party, or planning maintenance on your house. At work, it could be producing an information flyer, or planning an off site meeting including necessary logistics.

You normally have to do research, collect information, create a plan with some milestones, and in the end deliver towards the objective. My favorite tool for this is Microsoft OneNote. It is available for Windows of course, but also for iPad, iPhone, Windows Phone and Android phones. So you can create the plan on your office PC, but always bring it with you on a lighter device, including shopping lists etc. that you need to bring with you.

I am going to arrange a barbeque party, and I need to plan it. Here is how my planning OneNote looks like:

You can see my activities in a table format, with pictures and links to other web sites. Also note the flags in the activity column. They automatically create Outlook tasks for me, so I can keep track on my tasks related to this project. I have also a page for the shopping list, which will be synchronized to my phone and be with me when I need it in the supermarket.

Here is how you assign the tasks. If you are familiar with Outlook flagging, you will recognize they are the same here in OneNote.

The easiest way to keep synchronized OneNotes on different devices is to create it on Skydrive.

Here is how:

Go to the “File” menu, and select Web as location.  Create a “My Projects” OneNote for use by all your projects.

When this is done, you can do changes on any device, and it will sync the changes automatically to all other devices.

 

 

This is how it looks in Windows Phone, where I can find the “My Projects” OneNote on Skydrive, and pin the most relevant projects to the start screen on my phone.

And here is how my project looks like on the phone:

A quiet day in the office can be your most unproductive day, or time to make progress on your goals. You decide what ….

On days where there are few people at work due to school holidays, or a working day between to holidays, many come to work thinking “now that I am not going to be disturbed by colleagues, I can really get something done”!

However, many cannot tackle the loss of the daily pressure, and uses the day to chat with the few colleagues at work, drink coffee, maybe tidying up the desk, browsing the news on Internet, and in general having a good relaxing day.

Nothing wrong with that, and we all need a break sometimes, but it was not really how you planned to spend the day, was it?

What you could do instead is not look at what you need to achieve today, and not even next week, but in the months to come.

Have you defined your long term (full year) goals and objectives? If not, here is a simple format you can use with an example:

Objective	Execution plan	Goal/Measurement
Improve customer satisfaction	Implement a customer satisfaction survey. Analyze baseline results and implement improvements Re-survey customers to measure improvement	Implemented by 1. June Improvements agreed on by 1. August Survey done by 1. December. Achive 20% improvement over baseline
Another Objective	How to achieve the goals	Goals

Now you can create the 3 tasks from your execution plan in Outlook so it will be easier to follow up the plan, and not to forget to focus on your priorities. Without this we tend to use too much time on incoming mails/tasks from others. Make sure you define a start time for when to take the needed action. You do not want to be reminded on the action on the day for the deadline

The easiest way to do this is to estimate when you have to start, and use the start date for follow up, not the due date. I recommend to change the setting in Outlook to show tasks on start date in the calendar, and follow up your actions there. See this article for how to,  and more about working with  tasks: Have you tried to work with tasks in Outlook and given up?

Related I also recommend this article.

Let Outlook help you to achieve your 2012 goals!

Get out of your Inbox! Work towards Your agenda and goals, not others.

Many people spend far too much time processing and replying to mails. This can put your own goals at risk. If you spend most of your time working on “incoming”, when are you going to get time to drive your own agenda?

It is easy to get into the “victim role” here. You just got out of an exiting meeting, important for your success in the job, and you have one hour before your next appointment. What do you do?

1. Reflect on the outcome of the meeting and how you can use it to improve your results?
2. Go for a cup of coffee with colleagues who also attended where you discuss the outcome of the meeting?
3. Say to your colleagues: “Sorry guys, I have to “do my mail” before my next appointment. I wish I did not have so many mails”. Then you sit down and start from the top of your Inbox?

Get real! You will most likely never get less mail. Still, You can reduce the time used in your Inbox dramatically, freeing up time for your important stuff, and have time for valuable discussion with your colleagues.

How?

Does your Inbox looks something like this?

How do you attack this? Do you start systematically from the top, or are you looking through it to find the important stuff in between magazines, memos, and other non-critical information?

What if the mailman sorted your mail before he delivered it? Newsletters and advertising in one folder, then memos, and mail sent to distribution lists. On top of these folders, he would put the letters addressed personally to you, and other obviously important letters. Then it could look like this instead.

Would not that make it easier for you to start with the most important stuff when you collected your mail?

This is exactly what Outlook rules can do for you! Maybe you only have to look at a few, important mails before your next appointment, and free up time to focus on Your priorities.

Use “easy rules” to move mails to a folder

Use a rule to automatically move mail from someone, or to a distribution list out of your inbox and into a folder. Select the mail, and chose one of the easy options.

You can move the messages into an existing folder, like a distribution list folder, or create a new folder. All the following mail from that person, or to the selected distribution list will now be moved to the new folder.

Create a rule that moves all mails where you are on the cc line to a folder

We know that in many companies it is very common to put a lot of people on the cc line when sending a mail. Between 30% and 40% of the mail I receive are in this category. It does not mean I don’t need to read it, but I just don’t need to read it first. So have created a CC-mail rule so that the mailman can sort it into a folder for me that I can read when I decide. Here is how you can do it:

I recommend to create the CC-mail folder inside your Inbox as showed, because it is still in your Inbox, just sorted in a folder.

As we approach the week-end, what do you do with the 50 tasks you planned to handle this week, but never did?

If you use tasks in Outlook , either by creating it as a task, or flagging mail into what I call a “simple task”, and you don’t pay attention to it for a few days, you will find that they accumulate rapidly, you loose the overview, and the sense of reality when it comes to knowing how much work it is, and how long it will take to do the work.

My friend Grete, who drives Bedre tid always tell her clients to “talk with your tasks” regularly. I talk with my tasks in two ways. First when I do my week plan for next week. This I do Friday afternoon, or Sunday night as preparations for the week. This is my opportunity to “load balance” my week. Most people have a tendency to evaluate the workload based on the number of meetings in the calendar. Many appointments? A busy week, few appointments, a good week

However that does not take into account that most of your work does not happen in a meeting, but between the meetings!

After doing the week plan, I “talk to my tasks” daily because you have to re-prioritize as new information, and new demands on you come in. Let’s say I had a day without meetings, and now I have to spend 2 hours in a meeting. If I do not re-prioritize my tasks for that day, I will have an unrealistic workload.

For more on this, see Get rid of all red Outlook tasks in 5 minutes! And then learn how to get a total overview of your daily and weekly work load.

Back from Easter holiday and 100+ mails in your Inbox? How to prioritize the most important ones, and then handle the rest.

Normally I try to post something new every week, but some situations just come back to you after summer holiday, Christmas holiday, long weekends, and for many now after an Easter break. So, this time I pick something from the archive.

Have a look at how you can reduce the volume in your Inbox with up to 50% by moving mail not addressed primarily  to you out of your Inbox view automatically: Back to work after some days off and have 100+ mails in your Inbox? Where do you start? That will certainly help you to process the most important stuff first.

Another one. Have you been given the advise of looking at new email at fixed times, and not more than 1-2 times per day? In which world would that work ?  Most of us are mail addicts, and regularly check into the Inbox during the day. However there are two important rules I follow to be able to be productive, and prioritize what is important to me:

1. You decide when to look at the potential new mail, not the sender. Do you get the Outlook flag popping up in the bottom right hand of the screen every time you get a new mail? If you do, read this: Have you turned off the Outlook mail flag that pops up when you get a new mail?

2. Only touch the new mail in the Inbox once. Please don’t half-read a lot of mails, and then go back to them again and again until you finally decide to do something with them. Check out this: How to control all incoming mail requests, and never miss a deadline.

I wish you a happy return to work, where you set the priorities for what to do, and when to do it.

Email 40 years anniversary! Curse or blessing?

Although there are some dispute on when the first email was sent, I believe the experts at least agree on the year 1972. I probably sent my first email around 1984, working as a product manager for technical computer products in Hewlett-Packard. At that time there was really no Internet, and it was a company internal system called HP Mail. For me it revolutionized the communication with colleagues outside the country. I was able to communicate with persons in the development- and marketing center, as well as receive timely updates about products and plans. Before that, messages were sent by internal snail mail. Or, for a lot of important information, I did not receive it at all, since I was located in another country, and it was just to cumbersome and expensive to send a lot of information. For most of this communication, phone or meetings were not really a realistic option. For fast communication with customers we used the newest invention, the telefax

Today, we have a lot more choice in how to communicate, with IM, Web-sites, social media, and online distance meetings. So do mail still a place in our lives? I read about a managing director in France that has not used mail in 3 years and require people to either phone him, or meet him if they want. It is a curiosity, but for many anti email people he is a role model ….

Obviously he does not run a global business over several time zones. He most likely require all his employees to work from the office, with fixed work times (his). Do we really think that real-time communication is always the best?

Maybe I am more positive with this 40 year old communication technology because I have learned to “tame the beast”, and it has to be tamed for sure. But if you can do that, it is a valuable tool along with other and newer communication forms. For more about the advantages, see Rumors of the death of email are greatly exaggerated