Truth & Tech

In his book “Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity”, Tim Challies gives a number of helpful tips on becoming more productive in your everyday life and at the office.¹ Of those tips, here are seven to help you be more productive with Outlook and email. After reading through these, let me know what other tips and strategies you have by posting in the comments below!

1. Focus on emails/Outlook only at certain times throughout the day. Perhaps for the first ten minutes of every hour, open your Outlook and sort through emails. Or if you do most business via phone, open it once in the morning, once at lunch, and once in the evening before going home.

2. Set a limited amount of time to process emails and when you’re done, close your email and go back to other things. If necessary, setup a reminder on your phone to check your email and another one to make sure you close it so you don’t keep getting distracted by it.
3. If the first tip isn’t an option, at least try to remove distractions. Consider adjusting Outlook so that it doesn’t notify you every time you get an email. You can do this by going into Outlook, clicking on “File > Options “ and then clicking on “Mail” and adjusting the “Message Arrival” settings.
4. Simplify the folders you delegate emails to. Create naming a folder “To Process” and “Archive”. Determine to move everything in your inbox to one of these two folders or delete it. With search capabilities what they are, you can go to one of these folders and search for the email you’re looking for faster than you’d be able to find it in a specific folder. This reduces time searching for the right folder to file it away or to retrieve when you need it.
5. Commit to doing something with every email and allowing your inbox to simply be a sorting area. If you can respond to an email with a quick response, respond and move it to the archive or deleted items. If it’s something that needs a more thorough response, move it to the “Hold email to process” folder. If you have processed the email, just move the email directly to the “Hold for Archive” or “Deleted” folder. Keep it simple.
6. Schedule a small portion of each week to clean up your folders and make sure that you start the following week with a “clean” slate.
7. Use a “delayed” or “scheduled” send to write emails in advance and have them delivered at a specific time. Most email providers provide this as an option now. In Outlook, create a new message, go to “options” and then select “Delay Delivery”. In Gmail, click on the arrow next to “Send” and it will give you an option to “Schedule Send”. It is possible then to adjust the email’s delivery date and time to minutes to even days in advance.
8. BONUS Productivity Tip: Focus on the task at hand, especially if you limit how much time you spend on the task. Multitasking requires dividing your attention and resources and only increases the amount of time it takes to complete each task by spreading your resources to multiple tasks. You may get more done, but it’ll take you much longer to get those tasks done than if you were to just simply focus on the task at hand.

¹ Challies, Tim. Do More Better: A Practical Guide to Productivity. Challies, 2015.