Great Outlook Strategies
These articles are extracts from the new book Conquer Your Email Overload, Superb Tips and Tricks For Busy People They will help save you stress and time. And time is money.

The Magic Of Rules

AAAHHHHH. If you don't know about rules, this could be a life changing experience for you - I sincerely mean it. Well, if you spend a lot of time in your inbox it will be.

If you do know about rules, I suggest you sit back and have a little think about how you can use them more frequently and creatively to manage your emails. Rules could save you hours a week!

Rules are like having your own inbox secretary.
They help you manage your emails by reading them and then performing actions on the emails that match a specific set of conditions you set. All email programs have a Rules Wizard which walks you through setting a rule up.It's normally found under the Tools menu.

Basically there are five steps. The wizard asks you:

1. What shall I look at?
Emails that I receive
Emails that I send.

2 What should I look for? Here's a slim example of the many possibilites

1. A certain email address
2. Words in the subject line or the body of the email (or both)
3. Part of a word in an email address
4. If there is an attachment
5. A word within the email address

3. What shall I do with it?

1. Put it in a folder
2. Delelte it
3. Forward the email on
4. Answer with a template
5. Send it to your mobile phone
6. Any combination

4. Are there any exceptions to this rule?

5. Shall I run this rule now for your inbox / sent items when I turn on the rule?

See how marvelous rules can be for you?
The more rules you have, the more you automate your filing of emails. If you get 100 emails a day, rules won't stop those 100 from coming, however it means you don't persoanlly don't have to look and handk=le all 100 of them, especially if you have a lot of mundane draggign and droppiong. Thinking laterally this process also forms a hierarchy of incoming email importance for you.

Where Are They?
You might be thinking "Great Debbie, but how will I know a new email has arrived if I have it go straight to a folder?"

Have you noticed when you have new emails in your Inbox, the word Inbox becomes bold with a blue number next to it (indicating the number of new and unread messages)?

It's the same for Rules. All the folders holding new and unread messages will be bold with a blue number next to it. See Figure 3.

Two Top Tips:
1. One of the clever individuals in my Inbox workshop said set rule to delay sending his emails. After he pushes the send button, a 10 minute lag occurs until it's actually sent. He calls this his "rethinking" time in case there's ever changes that need to be made.e your name is not in the To: column.

Debbie Mayo-Smith (BSc Hons Econ) is an International Motivational Business Speaker and Managing Director of SuccessIS! (http://www.successis.co.nz) and a leading specialist in easy practical ways to improve business profitability, personal productivity and Internet marketing. Debbie lives in NZ and travels the world speaking, writing and training. By the way, if you'd like to get lots of neat tricks like this, plus marketing and business development tips, why not enrol for our free newsletter?

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