10 Tips To Use Outlook More Productively And Work Smart

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Outlook is a standard email platform, and it is part of the Microsoft Office apps. Outlook is an essential app in any corporation. Many people use this app every day, yet they never use it to its potential. There are some simple hacks that you can implement today to be more productive. The following is a breakdown of those tips.

Writing emails and responding is essential in any industry, and this is how companies communicate internally and with clients and customers. In general, people who work in offices reply to at least 5-10 emails a day. Therefore, people need to be more mindful of managing their time by smartly operating Outlook to reduce time spent sorting, reading, writing, and replying to emails.

Table of Contents

The following are tips to better manage and write emails using Outlook:

1- Avoid your emails in the morning

Do not start your day by checking your emails because it can significantly slow you down and impact your productivity. Instead, start your day by writing your action list or plan for the day. Doing so will ensure that emails or problems can wait until you first figure out the priority tasks.

If you start your day by planning tasks first then reviewing emails second, you will realise that you are more mindful when it comes to replying to emails because you will less likely spend more time on small tasks if you know that you have bigger fish to fry.

It might sound difficult not to check your emails before planning your day. However, most people plan their day around the problems they receive from their emails and let them control the day. But, if you do things in reverse and only check your emails after figuring out the priority tasks, you can take control of the day.

So what qualifies as a priority task? Simply think of it as the essential thing that needs to be done today. This is how you turn an average day into a productive day instead of endlessly wasting time with non-important tasks like replying to emails. Effective time management can ensure that your work is done on time by working smart and less stressed.

The best way to sort your task is to break them into three lists. First is the most urgent, which is your priority list or A list. Second is your B list which is important but not urgent tasks that you can afford to postpone. Finally, the C list is the not urgent and not important tasks.

A-List	B-List	C-List
Highly urgent	Not urgent	Not urgent
Extremely important	Important	Not important
Has the highest priority	Still a priority but can be postponed	It can be postponed for a long time

2- Do not have Outlook running in the background all-day

Why should you do that? Because you do not want to get distracted while doing something of high priority. Most people have Outlook open all day and get distracted by every email received. People who work in offices can receive at least 5-10 emails a day, and if you take 5-10 minutes reading and responding to every email, it can take 30-60 minutes just to reply to emails while putting more important and pressing matters on hold.

Humans can not multitask as much as we disregard ourselves. When multitasking, people split brainpower, which significantly drops their cognitive abilities. To realise how much humans are bad at multitasking, I suggest reading why humans can not multitask? There is a free test you can take to see how good are you at multitasking.

Therefore, close your Outlook when you are not using it: Doing so will ensure it will not distract you when you are doing something else. Also, ensure that Outlook is not working in the background of your computer, so you do not get notifications while working.

Moreover, do not have Outlook on your phone or disable notifications, so you do not get bothered outside your work hours. You need some time off work when you do not have to think about work. People who email you after office hours do not expect you to reply to them simultaneously. Just relax after office hours, enjoy the rest of the day, and come back to the office with a fresh mind the next day.

3- You do not have to reply to emails immideltay

This is another thing that most people do wrong. You do not have to reply to an email the minute you receive it. If you reply to emails immediately, it does two things to you: waste your time and possibly write a poor email with misleading or unchecked information.

It is critical to avoid replying to messages immediately, especially if sent to a client or stakeholder. Take time to search for the answer and gather the right information and write an email that is easy to read. This will save you from sending an embarrassing email.

There are two ways to ensure that you write the best emails and give the most accurate information.

Write an email and save it as a draft to check later. Even if you need to reply to an email urgently that is quite complex or long, write it and save it as a draft and come back to it later after drinking water or going to the washroom. Review the draft before sending; there is always mistakes to be found. You would be more likely to spot those errors if you checked the email twice. As the saying goes, “Measure twice, cut once”.
If you need to reply to an email that is quite urgent, but you do not have the answer, you can reply to the message by saying something like “Received will get back to you soon” or “Received, will check and get back to you as soon as possible”. People will be more understanding as they will know that you received their email and are trying to gather the right information and get back to them soon. You will be less likely to give wrong information by doing so.

4- Mind your grammar

The worst thing you can do is send an email with grammar and spelling mistakes. Sometimes being in a rush can result in writing a poor email with unintentional grammatical errors. However, the person who reads it can easily pick on those mistakes and misunderstand the meaning.

The errors that are quite common can negatively impact the meaning of your message, and most of those mistakes can happen when a person is in a rush to send something that they do not wordsmith their emails, resulting in poorly worded emails.

Luckily there are workarounds with these issues:

If you have fundamental problems with your grammar and spelling, there are no easy shortcuts. You have to go back to the basics, maybe pick up a book or practice to imporve your grammar. For example, you can give the book below a good read to brush on some grammar.

You can install grammar check software that can substantially help you improve your emails’ quality. For me, it has always been Grammarly. Grammarly was released in 2009 and had a decade to perfect its AI to correct your grammar and optimise your paragraphs to best suit the audience you are trying to write for.

Besides Grammarly, there are other grammar programs that you can add to your office suite as add-ons. The editor that comes pre-installed is still powerful assistance. However, for the people who are looking for an edge and want their emails to be perfect, I can not recommend Grammarly enough. The good thing about Grammarly is that it can be installed as an add-on in the office suite, which you can utilise at will.

In my line of work as an engineer, I realised that many people are just not good spellers or have poor grammar. For those who want to learn about this subject, I recommend reading: Why Are Engineers Bad At Spelling? How To Improve?

5- Make sure you copy the relevant people in your emails

CC: Carbon Copy

Copy relevant people in an email is essential, especially if they are extremely involved in your projects, such as your boss, manager, assistant, client, and stakeholder.

There are two main reasons you want to CC people into your emails:

Ensure that the relevant people, especially in your company, are up to date with your activities and heavily involved, and they can step in when you are not around.
Ensure that there are witnesses from your company concerning matters with clients and contractors. Suppose people outside the company do something unexpected or illegal, then having bystanders from your company can be helpful. In general, emails are usually used as evidence, which is why people should focus more on solidifying actions between different companies by email instead of just dealing with people over the phone.

BCC: Blind Carbon Copy

BCC is a way of coping someone in an email that the receiver or the people copied (CC) in the email cannot see.

Why do you need to use such a function?

Because it is another way of involving relevant people from your company without the receiver’s knowledge or sending the same message to more than one person without the receiver’s knowledge of the others’ email addresses, this is usually used for privacy reasons.

You will never know when you will need to use the BCC function. This is how you can activate BCC:

1- When writing a new email, click on the CC button.

2- Write in the BBC box the email address, then click OK.

3- The BBC field will be activated for this email.

6- Use expressive titles

Emails have been the primary way to communicate between companies for the last 30 years, and they will continue so for decades to come. Therefore, most email services, including Outlook, offer a search tool to help find old emails to extract information. Those search tools use many metrics and filters such as names, email addresses, email contents, date, time and email title.

You will likely exchange important information if you use emails daily. Those emails can be lost if they do not have a good email title to represent them. Using an expressive title can less likely result in losing emails, especially if it holds important information.

Here is what you need to do to use better titles:

Most companies use and generate a unique number for a project; you must include this project number in the title.
Companies who do not use a project number usually have a unique word to relate to that project, such as the street address or company name related to the project; this should be included in the email title.
Use Job name or job number followed by the issue or the purpose of the emails to make an expressive email title. Such as 435367-January22 materials or Pitt street – Labour procurement.
Some companies have a procedure on how to write email titles; you should ask your boss or your HR team for more details or if such a system exist.

7- Organise your emails

If you receive a minimum of 10 emails a day, you must have a system to sort emails from the highest priority to the least priority. Likely, Outlook gives you enough tools to do so without having to write things down on paper or use a journal.

There are many ways you can sort emails in Outlook:

1- Flagging messages is the easiest way to tell yourself that you need to take action for an email that you can not do right now. To flag, an email, simply click on the flag icon.

You can sort your emails to show only flagged emails. This is an excellent way to see what outstanding emails you need to respond to.

2- Use groups to colour code your emails. This is a fantastic tool for those who work on different projects within the company. You can create a specific colour code for every job to help you be highly efficient and quickly sort out those emails. This is how you can create colour coding:

Click on categorize, then click on set quick click.

Click on the drop-down menu, then select the colour you want, then click ok.

Give it a name than click yes.

Click on an email and select the category of the email. It will show on the heading of the email.

3- Use rules to organise messages sent from your organisation or client to specific folders. This is another step to make you exceptionally organised, especially if you work on multiple projects. This is how you can set up Rules in Outlook:

Click on an email you want to create folder for -> Go to home tab -> click rules -> click create rules

Click on Select folder

Create a new folder, give it a name, then click okay. Now all emails from this sender will go directly to the new folder.

It is usually a combination of the above that can help make you more organised and avoid missing emails, especially if you receive a high volume of emails in one day.

8- Recall massages

You wish you never sent that email to your boss or client or made a mistake that you realised only after hitting the send button. Outlook can actually recall those messages, as long as they have not been reviewed yet by the people you send the emails to. For example, if you email 5 people and 2 had reviewed your email before you recalled it, Outlook will recall only 3 emails out of 5.

This tool is fantastic as there are usually mistakes that we want to take back. In general, you can either recall an email as it has never been sent or replace it with another email if there is an issue you want to fix, and this is how you can do both:

Go to the send emails tab and double click on the email you want to recall.

Select either delete the email completely or replace it with a new email

You should receive an email shortly after to tell you if the recall or replace was successful or not

If you could not recall or replace the email because it was reviewed by the people you sent it to. The best way to solve this issue is to apologise for the error in the previous email and correct the information in the new email. You can say something like:

Please disregard the last email as it has the following errors.
Apologies for the previous email. Please disregard it. Then proceed with giving the right information.

9- Set multiple signatures

Anyone who works in a company or has his own company need a signature. The signature shows your company name, job title and contact details such as office address, mobile and office phone. Signatures can be set automatically in Outlook to show up every time you write or respond to an email.

Yet, many people take this feature for granted or pay little attention too, well we will show you how you can use this tool in Outlook to be highly productive and efficient with your time. If you work in marketing, human resources or accounting, this is a good tool because you might need to write the same email to different people.

You can set up a template that you can insert when you write a repetitive email and change some information to be relevant to the people you are sending this email to.

This is how you can set up multiple signatures:

Write a new email -> Message -> click on signatures to create a new signature

Click new -> Give it a name -> Click Okay

Write the content of the signature then click ok

Now you can write email templates you can insert with just a click

10- Mind your health and wellbeing

We can not make a list of email productivity without talking about your health and wellbeing. This point is crucial because responding and replying to emails can be so immersive that it can affect your health.

Just think about it: you sit on your desk for a minimum of 8 hours a day. Too much sitting down can cut your blood circulation throughout your body. In addition, the constant attention on the screen can hurt your eye, and you might have to wear glasses sometime in the future.

This is what you need to do to ensure that you keep your health in check:

1- Get up a few times to go to the bathroom, walk for a bit around your office or the house if you work from home or do some simple exercises. Avoid having a cup or bottle of water on your desk; this will force you to get out of the chair when you need to drink some.

2- Reduce the monitor brightness, which you can check quickly in the monitor setting. Most monitors have the brightness on 70% as default which is too high. Reduce the brightness to a more comfortable level for you.

3- Use Outlook dark mode. This is the perfect setting to avoid the constant bright white screen on your eyes. This is how you can activate Outlook dark mode:

Go to file

Go to Office Account -> Office Theme -> Black

You also have the benefit of switching the background to white when you review emails:

The Bottom Line

Outlook is essential software in any company. If you think that you need to learn more about Outlook, then I suggest the following book. It is quite easy to find what you need as it is well-indexed and explain everything through images and helpful tips. Amazon link is provided below: