Last week I was a motivational speaker for the Boeing One Team Meeting in Long Beach California. One of the other motivational speakers was Audrey Thomas, a Lean Office Expert.
Audrey's motivational speech, Your Personal Productivity Passport was a real eye opener for me on effectively using the Outlook software. Audrey started her speech suggesting that many companies spend millons of dollars on Outlook and follow up with very little training. Most Outlook users (including me, still using the 2003 version!) use this incredible technology to only 20% of it's capacity.
One of the first techniques suggested by this productivity motivational speaker is to use your right click button in Outlook. By right clicking on many feilds, you have a whole new world of possibilities - some you will use immediately and others you will come back to at a later date.
In addition to concrete tips, this inspirational speaker gave us points to think about so that we can redecide about how to best use our time and resources. For example, Audrey says that clutter in your inbox is a result of delayed decisions (so true for many of us!).
Some of the other fabulous productivity tips I garnered from the motivational speech were to:
- Customize your inbox view (click on View to see the options).
- Turn on the BCC (blind carbon copy) field in outgoing messages and copy all the CC's (carbon copies) into the BCC line. This way you are not sharing all email addresses with the whole list .
- Use Delivery Receipt to show a message was delivered into a recipient's email box
- Use Delay Delivery. This allows you to schedule delivery any time you like. For instance, if you are a night owl, sending out email at 3 AM may not be appreciated- instead, time the delivery for later the next day.
- Outlook allows you to create rules to help organize different files, folders and contacts by creating conditions that allow you to automatically move certain emails to different folders.
- Audrey told us how to add someone to contacts and modify the subject line of emails in the inbox for easier sorting later.
- You can Drag and Drop email where it may be needed later (contacts, taskpad, calendar)
- Audrey showed us how to color code our outlook calendar
Finally the motivational speech reminded us to play nicely and reviewed some important email etiquette. We will need another blog for this one!
