I don’t know about you but keeping up with my email is a daunting task. On an average day, I receive somewhere between 200-400 emails. Sifting through the noise to pinpoint the important messages can be a real challenge. I’ve always been on a quest to effectively manage my email and am fortunate to have two clients who I feel are shining examples of effective email management. One of them introduced me to a product called Auto-mate, which is an Outlook add-in by a company called Pergenex.
While I could much the same thing using Outlook’s built-in Rules feature, I quickly exceeded the number of rules I was permitted to create within Outlook. Some ideas as to how to use rules to improve your efficiency.
– File email after it has been read.
– File email after it has been sent.
– File email messages after you reply to or forward them.
– Forward newsletters that you’d like to share with staff members.
– Organize your messages by day, week, month and year.
– Organize your messages by company or client name.
– Automatically mark messages with colored flags.
– Automatically assign messages to categories. (My favorite – I have color coded my Categories to be consistent with my overall filing system, e.g. yellow = clients, blue = internal, etc.)There are lots of features built-in to Outlook not be mention all the Outlook add-ins out there to make your email experience more efficient and effective. Have something you wish Outlook could do? Ask us — I bet there is a solution out there.Have a tip you’d like to share? Post it here!