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Managing Time: New Tools and Strategies That Really Work

The most effective way to organize your e-mail is to set up an automatic filing system. By setting up an automatic filing system for your e-mails you’ll know by looking the folders that are in bold whether or not you need to spend valuable time looking at the content. For those items that aren’t pressing, you can check when you have time, they won’t clutter your inbox and distract you from your task at hand. Being inundated by e-mail can be very overwhelming and time consuming. If you can keep that to a minimum you can get some real work done.

If you’re an Outlook 2000 user or an Outlook 2003/XP user this is a fairly simple task. The explanation below is written for Outlook 2000, but is very similar to Outlook 2003/XP. This article breaks it down for you and walks you through the necessary steps to get you on your way to being more efficient.

You can organize the Inbox by using the Rules Wizard. The Rules Wizard helps you manage your e-mail messages by performing actions on messages that match a specific set of conditions. After you create a rule, Microsoft Outlook applies the rule when a message arrives in your Inbox.

Rules are a combination of conditions and actions that process mail messages. A rule is executed automatically when the specified condition is met.

This How To gives you directions on using Rules to move specific messages to a specified folder and to get rid of junk mail.

Create a Rule to Move New & Existing Mail (If you want to make sure you see the new e-mails in their respective new locations, make sure to create the subfolders in the Inbox and that the folder is expanded. If new messages arrive, the folder name will be in bold letters.

1. Select a message you want to create a Rule for.
• Ex: a Daily Report message you've received needs to be transferred to a Daily Reports folder.
• Note: The Daily Reports folder MUST be created first. See How to Create a Subfolder Below
2. Click on the Tools | Rules Wizard (you may need to click the double-down arrow to see the Rules Wizard option)or Click on the message and then click on the  ORGANIZE toolbar located at the top of the screen. You should see a Rules wizard button at the top right of Ways to Organize Inbox dialog box.
3. When the Rules Wizard appears:
• Click New. You may also use the Office Assistant for help or choose not to use it.
• One of the easiest and most effective ways to organize your e-mail is by sender.
• Click move new messages from someone
• Look below to the Rule Description Window
• Click on people or distribution list
• Select the address from your contacts list (The address must be in there to perform this function)
• Click Next after setting specific rules on each screen
• When you get to the last screen of the Wizard, before you click Finish, there should be a check mark next to turn on this rule. You should also place a check mark next to run this rule now on messages already in “Inbox” (or whatever folder you were in when the rule was created). 
• Click Finish.

Create a Rule for Junk Mail

1. In order to send e-mail to a Junk E-mail folder, you must first create this folder.
2. Select a message that you don't want to see in your Inbox again. (Be Aware: This Rule will automatically move this message to the Junk E-mail Folder)
3. Right-click on the message and select Junk E-mail then click add to Junk Senders List.

OR

Open the e-mail and from the Actions menu choose Junk E-mail then select Add to Junk Senders List.

4. These messages will go directly to the Junk E-mail folder.

5.      To empty the Junk E-mail folder, open it, select all the messages, by selecting the first one then scrolling to the end of the list that you want to delete, hold down the shift key and left-click the mouse. This will select all items between the first and last item. To select messages individually, hold down the Ctrl key, located below the shift key, and left-click each individual message. Once all messages are selected, right-click and select delete.   This will send the items to the Deleted Items Folder.

6.      To delete the items from the Deleted Items folder, right-click on the Deleted Items Folder and select Empty “Deleted Items” Folder.

How To Create Subfolder

1. Right-click on your Inbox and select New Folder.
2. In the Name field, type the name you want to call it.
3. In the Folder Contains field, make sure it says Mail Items.
4. In the Select where to place Folder, select Inbox or browse to the location where you want the folder located.
5. Click OK.
6. Look in the Folder List to see your new folder.

If the folder is not displayed, click the + symbol beside the Inbox to expand the list of subfolders

If you’ve found this tip helpful, believe me, this is just the tip of the iceberg. We’ll be sharing more information on how to manage your time better and organization tips, but these are just a few of the items on our great agenda for this year’s annual Focus on Finance seminar. For more information on this year’s agenda and resort locations click here http://focusonfinance2006.com/.