DO NOT LET YOUR INBOX RULE YOUR LIFE!
By Ann Van Belle,
Product & Solution Marketing Manager
Microsoft

Anybody working in an office environment, large or small, has to face the same problems: non-stop e-mails, conflicting commitments and endless interruptions. I am no exception and so I decided to do something about it and started to look for practical advice on how I could organize myself and how I can leverage the Microsoft tools to support me.

Very soon I found the book “Take Back your Life!” by one of the American ‘productivity gurus’ Sally McGhee, and I realised that if I wanted to win the battle of the ever overflowing inbox I needed to find new ways of getting and staying organised with the help of Microsoft Outlook, a much underused tool that most of us use on a daily basis but not to its full potential. I wanted the tool to work for me instead of me being the slave of my own Inbox.

In Take Back Your Life!, productivity expert Sally McGhee shows you how to take control and reclaim something you thought you’d lost forever—your work-life balance.  She teaches simple but powerful techniques for rebalancing your personal and professional commitments using the productivity features in Microsoft Outlook.
Intellectual capital is among any company's most important assets. When key employees are overwhelmed with e-mails and distractions, the potential of this asset cannot be realized.

In the book a number of beliefs were mentioned that can limit your productivity.

I picked out 5 that I came across when talking to customers:

There’s too much information coming at me too fast.
I get too many interruptieons.
I can’t find what I need when I need it.
It takes too much time to get organized.
I’m no good with technology.

Do these remarks sound familiar?
If they do, I would like to explain how you can move a step towards handling these believes and become more productive. By combining some simple rules of prioritisation and the effective use of MS Outlook to support you can come a long way.

We start with” Collecting” or the dreaded Inbox!
First of all your Inbox is one of the many collection points we use in our day to day job, such as notepads, paper inbox, voice mail, MS Outlook task list, e-mail etc...  It gets even worse when we use our own head as a collection point. The golden rule here is “less is better”, try to avoid using your head as a collecting point!

Ways to reduce these points:
- By transferring your voice mail to your MS Outlook inbox, this is technology that is available with the new 2007 Office system.
- By using 1 notebook for all your projects or using Microsoft Onenote, an electronic notebook, the information flow will be more easily managed.

So how can MS Outlook help in this vital exercise?
First by reducing the time spent on processing emails: use the views and reading panes. (Option View – Reading Pane)
Eliminate unnecessary mails by ensuring that you have good spam filters in place keeping all the junk emails out. (Tools – Options- Junk e-mail). You can create lists of email addresses that are considered as junk email, they are automatically routed towards the junk email folder and you save time because you don’t have to handle them manually.
Reduce the interruptions by putting alerts out before a meeting. And definitely put some rules on incoming email traffic. These rules have to be agreed upon by all in the company to be effective but can help tremendously to reduce precious time spent on managing the inbox.
 
One of the ways to save time is by filtering out the important emails.
An agreement within the company could be that if an email is sent to you directly that email requires for you to take an ACTION on it, if the email is sent with you in the cc line, this means you are not supposed to act on it. 
In MS Outlook you can setup a “cc folder “and you can create a rule where all mails that are cc-ed to you automatically are stored in this folder (Tools – Rules and Alerts) and they do not pollute your Inbox anymore.
 
Second rule: the “Processing and Organizing” of all the collected information. It helps to put fixed times aside in your agenda to go through this process. Discipline is definitely needed first by yourself to keep to the set rules and also by colleagues who have to respect the work rhythm you have set to achieve all your work goals.
Last but not least, the process of “Prioritizing and Planning”.  First of all I suggest making use of the 4 “D’s” for decision making when sifting through you Inbox whether it’s electronic or paper.

With every piece of information you need to consider following steps:
Do it: can I do the task within 2 minutes
Dump it: if it’s not important or related to your job
Delegate it
Defer it: you need to do something but it takes more than 2 minutes, so you need to schedule time in your agenda. These emails need to be transferred into tasks in your task list.

Next I suggest that you are driven by your task list rather than your inbox. This means you only look at your Inbox a few times a day and go through the process (4 D’s). For the remainder of the day you go through your task list.

It all comes down to good planning: you determine what the tasks are and then you reserve time for them in your calendar.

Finally, it is also useful to have your tasks organized in a certain way that is inherent to your job. We can organize the task list into categories (project based, objective/target based, time based).

If you are regularly away from your office/desk I suggest that the time based category is subdivided in periods in relation to what you have access to at that moment (telephone, computer, desk at work, home, online, etc). You will be able to use your traveling time more efficiently.

Today it is a fact that many companies have invested heavily in communications technology but are not yet able to gain all the benefits. The problem isn't in the technology but it is in the lack of education about its best, most productive use. Employees are drowning in a constant stream of information; e-mail, instant messaging, cell phones, pagers, land lines. The key to leveraging your technology investment is in educating your employees on how best to use the technology to increase productivity instead of reducing it!
We know that these elements come together when clients create an integrated management system that uses the capabilities of Microsoft Outlook. Productivity rises. Results soar

As mentioned on the site of Sally McGhee, customers benefit from applying these rules:
Time spent in e-mail: reduced by 32%. Hours reclaimed can then be refocused on identified objectives.
Time spent looking for information: decreased by 33%. This means, on average, 30 minutes "extra" each day, or approximately three weeks a year of additional productivity per worker.
Time spent in meetings: reduced by 19%. As managers and staff handle, track, and manage objectives more effectively, the time required for meetings decreases.
Number of interruptions in a day: decreased by as much as 61%. As teams work together more effectively, interruptions are significantly reduced.
Have I confused you totally by now? Not to worry, not only are there specific trainings available by companies such as Xylos, TimeSmart, and others but I can also warmly recommend the book “Take back your Life” by Sally McGhee which has helped me a lot and will not only put your mind at ease that you are not the only one having problems, but also give you a number of excellent solutions and ideas to ensure you more freedom and productive time in both your professional and private lives!
I enjoyed explaining all of the above at a recent ‘SITE Meet & Lunch’, I hope you will have found it as useful as the SITE BeLux members obviously did.
Good luck and enjoy your newfound freedom!

A few useful resources:
www.microsoft.com/greattips
Time-smart newsletters
www.time-smart.com
Take Back Your Life – Sally McGhee
www.mcgheeproductivity.com
Find a partner
http://directory.microsoft.com

Contact:
Ann Van Belle
Product & Solution Marketing Manager
MICROSOFT
annvb@microsoft.com