It happens to all of us: we have a few days off work or a day stuck in meetings.  When we get back to our Inbox it has so many emails in it that it looks like an insurmountable task to get it under control.

Take yesterday for example.  I went skiing instead of working. Yes skiing in Australia (about 3 hours drive from home). Nice work-life balance going on here.  The Doctor prescribes work-life balance to patients as well as self-prescribing it.  Anyway, it was a lovely day skiing: sunny, great snow, beautiful views, hardly any people so no lift queues.  I had a lovely time.  I didn’t think about work. I didn’t think about the emails piling up in my Inbox.  That’s because I use some clever functions in Outlook to help me manage my email.

I use the Rules and Alerts function to file some emails (newsletters, magazines, media bulletins etc), the Out Of Office Assistant to respond to incoming email and advise the sender that there are other people who can help them while I am out of the office. On top of that, some incoming emails are automatically categorised, some change colour.  I even have Rules that I can apply after reading the emails. For example, all emails in my Inbox with the words soccer or TUFC in them, move to the Soccer folder.

As you can see, my software helps me file as well. I hope you have yours set up to help you as well. For all its foibles, Microsoft Outlook is a handy and very powerful tool!