First of all Happy New Year to all our readers and welcome back to work J
I’m sure you all have enjoyed the holidays and now recharged to work through another year.
Your inbox is sure to be full of emails piled up while you were away and so in this first post for the year, we will show you some of the ways that you can customize outlook to suit your style of working and also effectively handle the pile of emails in your inbox.
Tip 1: Auto Highlight Important Emails in Outlook
Not all emails in your inbox will require immediate attention for example newsletters, so how do you pick out which ones are urgent and which ones can be dealt with later?
Outlook has an in-built feature which automatically highlights by color coding emails so that you remain focused and easily identify important emails from the hundreds of emails you receive.
For me, I’m only interested in emails that have the word Outlook in them.
I’ve setup Outlook so that it automatically highlights (Red Bold) any email with the word Outlook in it.
This way you don’t have to waste time scanning through hundreds of emails.
Here’s how to auto-highlight important emails in Outlook
Tip 2: Mark Outlook Emails READ only after you ACTUALLY Read them
If you are not using the auto highlight option above, you would likely be clicking through each email in your inbox to find the ones that you need to deal with BUT…
As you are clicking through your emails, Outlook is marking them as READ, which means they will no longer appear BOLD for you to clearly identify which ones are still left to be ACTUALLY READ or dealt with.
Here is a simple setting in Outlook which lets you set a minimum time that you need to be on an email before it is marked as read (I have set mine to 5 second):
Tip 3: Easy Email Search Tricks in Outlook
In the old days, finding an Outlook email meant wading through folders and manually searching for the correct email. Finding emails now is EASY particularly if you know some tricks to help you get more accurate search results. Here are a few of my favorite search tricks in Outlook.
I hope you find this tips useful in working through your emails this year.
If you have other tips for handling emails in Outlook, please share it with our readers by leaving a comment below
