7 Tips to Save Stress! Automate Your Outlook Now!

Estimated read time: 1:20

Summary

In a world where the average professional spends nearly 11 hours a week managing emails, automating your Outlook inbox can be a game-changer. Discover how to optimize your email management with effective strategies, from using Quick Steps and templates to setting up rules and delays. This video from Teacher's Tech will guide you through 7 essential tips that can halve your email time and boost your productivity.

Highlights

Automation can cut your email management time in half! ✂️🕒
Turn on Focused Inbox to keep essential emails upfront! 🔍📧
Master Quick Steps to automate multiple actions with a single click! 🚀🖱️
Templates simplify sending repetitive emails, making it quick and easy! 📄✉️
Sweep and Rules provide a means to clean your inbox efficiently! 🛁📂
Schedule your emails with Delay Delivery to suit varying time zones! 🌍⏰
Utilize Co-pilot to smartly manage emails using AI! 🤖📧

Key Takeaways

Automating your Outlook inbox saves time and increases productivity! 📧💼
Use Focused Inbox to segregate important emails from regular ones, ensuring better organization! 🗂️✨
Quick Steps is a powerful feature allowing you to automate and streamline common email tasks! 🚀📑
Templates can revolutionize the way you manage repetitive emails, saving you valuable time! ⏳✉️
Sweep and Rules help keep your inbox clean by organizing or deleting emails based on set conditions! 🧹📥
Delay Delivery allows you to schedule emails to be sent at a preferred time, catering to time zones or work habits! 🌐📬
Co-pilot in Outlook leverages AI to draft emails, summarize content, and provide insights, taking your email game to the next level! 🤖📧

Overview

Managing emails takes up a huge chunk of our professional lives, clocking in at around 11 hours per week. But with a few clever strategies, you can reclaim that time and boost productivity! Enter the world of Outlook automation, where features like Focused Inbox, Quick Steps, and Templates are your new best friends. Jamie from Teacher’s Tech is here to pave the way to an organized inbox.

Imagine a world where your emails sort themselves. Quick Steps can execute multiple actions in one swift move, and if you're constantly sending similar emails, templates save the day. You can also schedule emails according to your preferred timeline. With these tactics, mundane email management becomes a thing of the past, freeing you up to focus on more critical tasks.

And then there's Co-pilot, the ultimate game-changer in email management. With AI Helpers on your side, drafting, summarizing, and exploring your emails becomes a breeze. Say goodbye to clutter and hello to efficient handling of your inbox. These tools not only optimize time but also transform the way you work. Get ready to revamp your outlook on managing emails!

Chapters

00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Email Automation in Outlook The chapter introduces the concept of email automation in Microsoft Outlook to improve productivity. It starts by highlighting the significant amount of time professionals spend managing emails, which is over 28% of their working hours. The narrator, Jamie from Teachers Tech, promises to demonstrate how automating the Outlook inbox can significantly cut down this time and boost productivity. The first tip provided is to enable the 'Focused Inbox' feature, which helps in managing emails more efficiently.
00:30 - 01:00: Setting Up Focused Inbox The chapter provides a step-by-step guide on how to set up a Focused Inbox in an email account. It starts with navigating to settings, selecting the mail option, and then choosing the specific account for applying Focused Inbox. The user is instructed to sort messages into 'Focused' and 'Other' categories and then save these changes. Upon setting, emails get divided into the two categories, with an option for further customization.
01:00 - 03:00: Using Quick Steps for Efficiency This chapter discusses how to enhance efficiency using 'Quick Steps'. It explains organizing emails by categorizing or moving them into different tabs like the focused inbox, which helps in staying organized. The chapter then focuses on 'Quick Steps' found under the Home tab in the ribbon, illustrating how to create new quick steps, such as setting ones for meeting follow-ups, to save time.
04:00 - 06:00: Using Templates to Save Time The chapter "Using Templates to Save Time" focuses on the process of managing Quick Steps, which are essentially template actions that can be customized to perform multiple tasks at once. The narrator guides the reader through creating a new Quick Step, starting with naming it and then defining actions such as moving an email to a different folder and forwarding it to someone else. The chapter emphasizes the flexibility and time-saving benefits of utilizing different actions for Quick Steps.
06:00 - 07:30: Sweeping Emails with Rules The chapter 'Sweeping Emails with Rules' discusses how to organize emails using automated rules. The speaker demonstrates the process by first selecting the 'move' action to relocate emails to a specific folder named 'demo'. Next, they add another action by choosing to 'forward' emails to a designated address. This allows for better management and organization of emails.
07:30 - 09:30: Creating Custom Email Rules This chapter teaches how to create and manage custom email rules efficiently. It covers adding and removing actions, using shortcuts for quick access, and organizing rules by changing their order.
09:30 - 11:00: Scheduling Email Deliveries The chapter 'Scheduling Email Deliveries' explains how to manage email drafts within an email application. It starts by describing how to edit or delete email drafts. The user demonstrates navigating back to their inbox from the draft section to apply changes or review an email. By selecting an email, such as one from Microsoft, the user is shown how emails are moved from the inbox to drafts upon selection. The chapter highlights the ease of navigating and managing email status between being a draft or actively filed within the email system.
11:00 - 13:00: Setting Up Automatic Replies The chapter titled 'Setting Up Automatic Replies' discusses the process of editing and sending quick notes as automatic replies. The transcript describes two methods of sending these notes. The first is manually writing and sending to a selected recipient. The second method involves using a keyboard shortcut, Control Shift 5, to quickly set up and send the reply in the demo environment. Additionally, the process includes reviewing drafts and emphasizing the usefulness of these automatic features.
13:00 - 15:30: Utilizing Co-Pilot in Outlook The chapter titled 'Utilizing Co-Pilot in Outlook' explains the process of using templates in Microsoft Outlook to save time by sending repetitive emails more efficiently. It describes how to access and manage these templates through the Outlook interface.
15:30 - 16:00: Conclusion and Invitation for Tips The chapter provides a concluding overview and practical demonstration of managing templates within Microsoft products. It explains how users can quickly add templates to emails and offers guidance on editing or deleting these templates. The focus is on encouraging users to customize and refine templates to suit their needs, ensuring an efficient and personalized user experience. The chapter invites feedback from users on further improving these functionalities.

7 Tips to Save Stress! Automate Your Outlook Now! Transcription

00:00 - 00:30 the average professional spends over 28% of their time managing emails that's nearly 11 hours per week imagine what you could accomplish if you could cut that time in half in today's video I'll reveal how automating your outlook inbox can save you hours and boost your productivity hi I'm Jamie and welcome to teachers tech let's Jump Right In the first tip I want to give you to manage your outlook more effectively is making sure that you have your focus inbox turn turned on right now notice it just says inbox I'm going to go up to the menu up top go under view
00:30 - 01:00 view settings and under mail here I'm going to go to focused inbox choose the account that you want to apply this to I'm going to click sort message into focused and other click save I'm closing out and now notice I have focused and other so right now it went through and divided this it between the two different ones you can customize this as you go along too so if you look into others
01:00 - 01:30 if there's ones that you wanted to be in focused you could categorize them or simply rightclick and then we can move them into different places different tabs that would recognize but we can also move to focused inbox or always move to focus inbox and this will help it even learn better to keep you organized my next time-saving tip is to take advantage of quick steps I'm under the Home tab and if you take a look in the ribbon we'll go across and we have quick steps right here I have one quick step I'm going to make a brand new one this was to follow up on meeting
01:30 - 02:00 I'm going to go and drop down and we're going to go and manage quick steps so once you click this you're in a spot where you can create your new Quick Step and I'm just going to go select this let's start by giving this a name and I'm just going to call this move and forward it so I want to take this email move it to a different folder and have it forwarded to someone else and those are kind of just random actions but you can add a lot of different ones so choose my action
02:00 - 02:30 if I drop down here you can see all the different actions here the one I want to do first is move to where do I want it to have be moved to if I drop down you can see the different options I could create a brand new folder I'm going to just search for a folder I already have created called demo I'm going to go ahead and add another action now so if I drop down and take a look at the list you're going to see forward right here and all the different other options I'm going to say forward too who who do I want this forward to well I'll just pick this email right here and I could add
02:30 - 03:00 more if I wanted to I could go ahead and remove this uh these different steps or these different actions as well and I could keep adding more actions what I like is there's also a shortcut to be even more efficient so if I drop down here you see the different options I'll just choose this control shift 5 and once all done hit save and you notice it popped up right over here so if I wanted this to be the top one if I have lots of them just change the order here so if I move the the Quick
03:00 - 03:30 Step Up Now this becomes the top one I can go back and edit these or delete them from here so if I go ahead and just exit out here and I'm in my inbox let's go ahead and apply it to this one so let's say I have this Microsoft one I could go ahead and click on this so notice it's moved out of here so where did it go well if I take a look at demo over here notice it's in draft here because if I go to
03:30 - 04:00 edit it I could go ahead and write a quick note and send it from here so it didn't send it out so I could go ahead and add a quick note and it's to the right person that I picked but then I could go ahead and hit send and remember the other option was to use the shortcut so if I just said this one I could use the control shift 5 and just like that it's going to be in the same place of the demo and we're going to have it in here you can see there's the other draft here as well so take advantage
04:00 - 04:30 of quick steps and getting things done faster in Microsoft Outlook here's another big time-saving tip and Outlook and that's using templates so if you're sending the same email over and over again you can use a template to speed this up I'm going to click new up top here and as soon as I do that you'll notice that we have the message tab I'm going to move over to apps and I already have my templates here but if you don't you will find it here and this is where you can pin or unpin
04:30 - 05:00 it and then it's going to show up right here so as soon as I click on this now Microsoft already put a few in here and this is how how quick they are to use so if I was going to say this one I can click on it it gets added to the email right away at any time if you want to change these or delete these just go ahead and click the delete or use the edit template and you can change whatever you want so in this one if you wanted to add Maybe a a bit longer template what I would do is and if you
05:00 - 05:30 know you're using it over and over again I would start an email and get it how you have it how you wanted to have it looking in here you could add any attachments you could change the color on any of these so if I just quickly just to show you a little bit of a demo here and if I was going to put an attachment in here as well so let's just pick this Excel practice sheet this could be now if I go ahead and copy this contrl C go back to my template paste it in here and I'm just going
05:30 - 06:00 to call this demo hit save so notice it's in there with the uh with this and everything so I'm going to go ahead and delete this discard this message and let's go ahead and create a new message and if I go up top we have my my templates because I've pinned it here click on it and here's my demo one that I have here so it shows shows me here's the other ones here if I click on it it goes right
06:00 - 06:30 inside here so it's even giving the attachment here it's giving the the uh formatting that I added to this and you can make it look any way you want and then copy paste it over this can be a real timesaver this next tip for organizing your email is a quick one but often overlooked let's use this email as an example if you look up at the Home tab and inside the ribbon well we're going to move to sweep so sweep quickly will make a rule around the selected email authors so since I have
06:30 - 07:00 that email selected if I select sweep it will come up with this message it shows me for who the email is from and what rule it will apply so it makes a very quick way so if you want to let's say always move messages older than 10 days from the inbox folder and move to where so I could say create my own in this case we'll do an example let's call this demo 2 and I'm going to click save let's go
07:00 - 07:30 ahead and hit okay so notice now I could view my rules I'm just going to hit okay but it cleaned up a lot of my emails here if I look at demo two it has those seven different emails that I was quickly able to organize now I could have chosen to delete these as well that's part of the rules that you get to make up for yourself this next tip is a very powerful tip it's how you can fil incoming emails with a rule now I've kind of showed you with sweep how it creates a rule
07:30 - 08:00 very simple rule this will allow you to have some more customization so in this case I'm getting these Microsoft invoices I just want them to automatically let's say go into a folder when they get into my inbox so I can go up and create a rule by choosing rule manage rules and I can go choose the account that this will be part of and click add new rule now just like before we give
08:00 - 08:30 it a name and I'm just going to call this demo what's my condition going to be so it dropped down and select for this one I'm going to say subject includes so and then now I can put the words in so if I just put in if I look at this it has Microsoft invoice I'm going to put those words in it so I'll say Microsoft invoice just leave it there now I could add another condition if I want it or go right to the action what do I want to have happen so I'm going to drop down
08:30 - 09:00 and I want it to move into a folder what folder is it going to be well I'll drop down and this time I'll create a folder and I'm going to say Microsoft invoice just like this invoices and hit save so I have my condition if I see something go through with this and the action and you can also see that we can add another action or we can have an exception to this as well now if I
09:00 - 09:30 save this this will apply to all incoming future messages with this but if I want to run the rule now based on all the messages that I already have with an invoice I could choose this one and hit save because what's going to happen is it's going to go through my emails if I look for Microsoft invoices it cleaned up the past ones as well and any future ones will go right to there so creating
09:30 - 10:00 these rules to filter incoming email will keep things clean for you this next Microsoft Outlook tip is how to send your emails with a scheduled delayed delivery you don't want to send it right away you want to be able to craft your emails and have it sent out exactly when you want maybe it's different time zones or maybe it's just the way you work so let's say I've crafted this very important email here and I want to send it out to my team if I don't want to send it right away don't click Send just do the drop down and schedule send if you'll see here they show
10:00 - 10:30 different times if it was last chosen as a time to send out but you can go and choose a custom time as well so I could go pick a time schedule what time I would like to be maybe I want to come really early in the morning and then hit send and you'll notice is it's not going to be in your scent items it's going to go to your drafts if I move over to my drafts you'll see it right in here if I click on it there's a note here it's a scheduled send if
10:30 - 11:00 I want to go through an edit I can modify the email or send it now if I would like but take advantage of crafting and sending later don't forget about setting up your auto replies so whether it's a business trip or vacation this will let people know you're unavailable let's go up to our view and then to view settings again this time we're going to go under accounts and you're going
11:00 - 11:30 to see that there's automatic replies at this point you can pick what account you wanted to be connected to go ahead turn this on what's the dates that this is going to be for so if you want specific dates you could turn this on and then pick between certain dates and times and you'll also have some options to block the calendar for this period automatically decline new invitations for events or decline and cancel my meetings during this period so you decide if any of
11:30 - 12:00 these are uh matching your needs here is where you're going to write your message so let's say I have this message that I'm just letting people know that I'm taking a much needed break in here and then I can also add on is this going to be uh send replies outside the organization or only to contacts so once you get everything kind of set up the way you want go ahead and hit save so now these are going to be sent for you during that time if someone sends you an email if you want
12:00 - 12:30 to go back to this at any time remember it's under the accounts and we have our automatic replies and you can go ahead and turn it off and save it the ultimate Microsoft Outlook tip I have for you here today that beats all the other ones kind of like one tip to rule them all is co-pilot if you have co-pilot available to you take advantage of it I'm going to show you a few quick things that co-pilot can do for you but I'll come out with more detail video that I'll place up top in the card let's
12:30 - 13:00 take a look at these tips so if you're drafting an email you can simply go up top to co-pilot and draft with co-pilot or even get coaching tips now I can go to the Body Hit forward slash and I can go draft with co-pilot put in my prompt again the more detail The Prompt the better and generate but it also allows you once it's generated you can do some customization from it uh you can see the different suggestions but you can keep it and it's there now what I really like also is if I
13:00 - 13:30 go to any email co-pilots at the top I can get a quick summary so you can see to to see how much time this can save you now now the thing I really like is if I go over to co-pilot on the side here this connects with my Microsoft 365 and different people in my organization uh so here's an example here so here's a prompt that they already have started stay informed so what's latest from Cathy with the emails chats and files if I click on it it goes down to my prompt I can
13:30 - 14:00 send it and it's going to go look through any of the different emails different things sent from Kathy and it will even put different links uh in the to the email so right here I could click on uh the different emails or edit them Pages you can see they're citing where the information came from so it makes it easier to search your email using co-pilot but I can also ask things about it to sum up different emails go searching through email calendar and it will even
14:00 - 14:30 have some different ideas for prompts if I open them up you can see all the different ones that uh you can go through whether it be catchup learn create Ask so co-pilot is definitely a game changer inside Outlook watch for that video that I will have coming up shortly I hope these tips that I showed you today about Microsoft Outlook will save you a lot of time do you
14:30 - 15:00 have any other tips that you would like to share write them down in the comments down below thanks for watching this time on teachers Tech I'll see you next week with more Tech tips and tutorials