80-20 Rule Applied to Outlook Emails (stay focused on real work)

I’m sure everyone is aware of the famous 80-20 rule and apply it to your business model (we do at Standss). In this post I will show you how the 80-20 rule can be applicable to handling emails to get the best results so read on…

For those who are not aware, this principle states that most of our results (80%) come from a small portion of our actual work (20%).  An example in terms of sales is 80% of our sales come from 20% of our customers.

How does this apply to emails?

Well, check your inbox now, I’m sure you will notice that out of all the emails in your inbox, only a small portion would actually be important or those which will yield you the most return.

In the next few posts, we will share some simple tips that will ensure you are focusing only on emails that are ACTUALLY work-related and yield you the best results (leads, sales, productivity boost etc). Here is the first tip in this post.

Tip 1:  Use Outlook Rules to Process Newsletter emails

Do you subscribe to email newsletters? Newsletter can be informative and interesting but they also distract you from your real work. So rather than deleting or manually filing each newsletter, you can setup a simple rule using Outlook Rules to automatically file your newsletters to a separate folder.

This way you are not distracted from your real work, your inbox remains clean and you can easily find the newsletters later when you want to read them.

How to create a Rule

BEFORE creating the Rule, create a folder inside Outlook where you want the newsletter emails to be moved to. Then …

• Go to your Inbox.
• In Outlook 2013/2010, Click the Home tab > In the Move group, click Rules > Manage Rules & Alerts…
  In Outlook 2007, Click Tools > Click Rules & Alerts
• Click New Rule to display the Rules Wizard.

• “Move Messages from someone to a folder” will already be highlighted. (This example assumes that the newsletters come from the same email address – otherwise you can use one of the other predefined Rule Templates)
• Click “people or distribution list” to display the Rule Address screen.

• Choose a name from the list or type in the name/email address in the From field and then click OK.
• Click the hyperlinked word “specified” to bring up the Choose Folder dialog. Select the desired folder from the list and then click OK.

Once the rule is created, any emails coming from the email address will automatically be moved to the chosen folder.

To apply the rule to existing newsletters in the folder, go back to the Rules and Alerts screen and click “Run Rules Now” button

If you don’t like using the Outlook rules, you can try QuickFile Pro for Outlook addin. This addin also has a special Newsletter feature which moves emails to dedicated folders automatically PLUS reminds you at a time of your choosing to look at your newsletter.

I hope you find this tip useful.

We will share more tips in the next post on how to stay focused on real work to get the best results from the least effort, so stay tuned.