661 – Finding mail and slimming down

Posted on December 16, 2022 by ewand

Learning how to find stuff in email is crucial, since many of us get so much that we let it accumulate until eventually it becomes a problem. Sifting through the many cc’ed work mails, or finding the order confirmation email in your personal mailbox amongst all the other stuff, we’re more reliant on search than ever.

This is a topic that has been covered numerous times in previous ToWs – 573 – Searching in Outlook and 504 – Searching Outlook for example – but is worthy of a revisit since we may have a chance to pursue the fallacy that is Inbox Zero over the next few weeks. And maybe it’s a time to find and delete the special offer emails and once-in-a-lifetime invitations that may be clogging up our personal mailboxes too.

Work mail

Dealing with desktop Outlook on the PC, there are plenty of tools available to help you find specific messages, in fact there’s a whole toolbar full of them.

As you look to search mail that meets your chosen criteria – it’s from someone in particular, maybe with a keyword in the subject, or that you know has an attached PowerPoint file, you’ll see that clicking the filters and options inserts the actual commands that will drive the search, into the Search bar positioned at the window’s top.

Remembering a few of these means it’s quick and easy to search for mail from a person (you don’t need the quotes, really, and you could use just a part of their name) by typing straight into the box. ALT+Q (for query?) sends your focus straight onto the search bar, so if you’re a keyboard warrior, you could ALT+TAB to Outlook, ALT+Q and enter a search command, before your mouse-toting colleagues have even clicked a toolbar. While we’re at it, remember that CTRL+number jumps to the location on the (now vertical) icon bar on the left, so CTRL+1 will normally be mailbox, CTRL+2 is calendar, CTRL+3 contacts, and so on.

Commands could also be used to filter on properties of a message that are not so easily visible through the UI – eg from:ewan messagesize:>10mb or from:nico sent:”last week”. See here for more examples of the kind of thing you can type. Look under Recent Searches to re-run ones you’ve typed before.

Reducing Mail Bloat

Is your mailbox size is starting to look under strain (look under the File menu to see how big your ‘box is and what the limit is)? With an active work mailbox in M365, it shouldn’t be much of a risk unless you genuinely never delete anything, but a quick way of identifying the big rocks and getting rid of them may be needed occasionally.

You could run a one-off search for all big mail as per the instructions above, or for extra control try creating a Search Folder. Expand the folder tree on Outlook’s left side, and scroll towards the bottom, to locate the Search Folders hierarchy, right-click on the top of the tree and choose New …

This will bring up a wizard which creates a query across your entire mailbox or other data file, but which looks like a folder; it’s visible only in Outlook desktop (ie not in web or on mobile) but can be a great way to locate stuff that might be filed away in the darker recesses of your mailbox.

You can choose from some set templates or do your own custom thing entirely. The age of this feature is somewhat given away by the default value for “Large mail”… click the Choose button and enter something meaningful (like 10000 for ~10MB).

This should give you a few easily deleted big mails to at least get any short-term capacity problems dealt with.

Right-click on the Search folder and choose Customize… to give it a better name, or to tweak the criteria.

Home email

If you have a Hotmail / Outlook.com etc mailbox, there may be a more pressing size issue, as over a period of years you might have been signed up to a newsletter every time you buy something online, and without realizing it, those could account for gigabytes of data bloat on your mailbox. If every notification from Amazon or eBay is 400K, they soon mount up to a meaningful size.

If you have a free Outlook.com account, you should have a 15GB mailbox quota and if you have the account associated to a Microsoft 365 home or work subscription, you’ll get 50GB.

To check, go into Settings and search for Storage.

The UI for Outlook.com is simple and effective, but one thing it doesn’t do a great job of is handling message sizes.

Sort by size and you’ll see a group heading showing which emails are the largest (displayed by default with the biggest on top), but nowhere can you find out what the actual message size is.

If you want to do a mass clean-out of your Outlook.com account, then you could try sorting by From, however the UI won’t let you click on the group heading to select all emails from that sender and make it easy to delete them.

The Windows Mail app on Win11 doesn’t offer Size either, not even to sort by.

Sometimes, the old ways are the best – you get much more functionality if you add your Outlook.com account to full-fat desktop Outlook, allowing you to change the view, see and sort by message sizes etc. Oh, and yes, you can even set up a Search Folder too. Now, tidy away!

This is the last “regular” Tip o’ the Week until January.

If you’re still here next Friday, look out for next week’s special edition – it’ll be a belter.

660 – Contacts in D365 CRM

Posted on December 9, 2022 by ewand

Sales people tend to not like CRM systems very much. They are usually foisted on the poor folk who need to figure out how to get what they need out of them, while navigating a cumbersome and unhelpful set of behaviours and expectations. And that’s just the sales people – the CRM implementations can be poor too.

If you have to use CRM, and you’re lucky enough to be using Dynamics 365 Sales (if not, you can get a free month’s trial), then there are some handy contact management tools worthy of a few minutes’ attention. First of all, the Outlook integration for the latest D365 CRM service means if you have an email from a customer or partner, you can track it and quickly add contacts on the email to the CRM system by invoking the Dynamics add-in.

Click the Dynamics 365 icon in Outlook and you’ll see a sidebar show up on the right. The “Set Regarding” option lets you add the email to a customer record in CRM. Below that, if the contact doesn’t exist already, you’ll see the option to add it by clicking on the recipient’s name and hit the + button on the lower right.

Depending on the rules of your particular system, you’ll probably need to provide a job role and maybe some other fields, and you might not be able to associate that contact with an account yet – perhaps you’ll need to save it to Dynamics first, then make the association with the account to which the contact belongs.

If the Account field is locked when you first add the contact, then once your contact has been saved in the sidebar, click the hamburger menu icon on the top left and look under Recent to open that contact again, then you should be able to choose the account name from that view, rather than fishing about in the main CRM UI for all the other added contacts.

From within the same sidebar UI, you can fire up a more fully-featured view by opening it in a separate Dynamics window. From there you can more easily do stuff like matching the contact to one in LinkedIn, if you have Sales Navigator access; it’s a handy way of associating the two, though annoyingly it doesn’t automatically pick up the LinkedIn photo and associate it with the CRM contact.

To set a picture for your contact, click on the circular initials at the top left of the name and that lets you choose a photo – ideally, you’ll have already saved the mugshot to your machine first, though if the image is online – a company website, for example – you might be able to grab the direct URL to the photo and paste it into the Upload Image dialog.

Getting images from LinkedIn can be a little more laborious especially if you’re doing this in batches. Here’s a fairly simple technique to make it easier.

If you have LinkedIn Sales Navigator and it’s integrated to Dynamics 365, open the LinkedIn tab for your contact – assuming you’ve matched them already. Right-click on the profile picture and choose Save image as. Save it to your Downloads folder.
If you don’t have Sales Navigator, then try searching LinkedIn in another window, find your contact then open their profile. Right-click on their profile photo, choose Save image as, save to Downloads folder.
Now back in D365, click on the initials back on the main contact page, to bring up the Choose Image pop-up. Click the Upload Image button, navigate to Downloads – change the view in the file picker dialog to “Extra Large Icons” to make it easier to find the right one – and select the pic you’ve just saved. Click the Change button and you’re done.

OK, so you have an image for each of your contacts – so what? Well, all the contacts you’ve just added should be visible in the Org Chart function which appears on the main toolbar of the Account. With a bit of dragging and dropping, you can quickly lay out the reporting structure for your known customer contacts.

Handles will appear on contacts as you move them around, to help manage the way the chart is displayed and keep it simple. Save the chart layout when you’re happy, and you can show your boss how diligent you’re being at managing your customer relationship. Now, who wouldn’t want that?

655 – Like my email

Posted on November 4, 2022 (Updated November 4, 2022) by ewand

Every time you buy anything, stay anywhere or eat something, you’re peppered with requests to review and recommend whatever it was. If review / like fatigue has not yet set in, there’s now the ability to signal a reaction with emails in Outlook and M365.

The likey-likey feature is only present for emails in your own organization – ie. you can’t like that email that informs you’ve won the state lottery, or that your Apple ID has been compromised (though it is reported that sometimes the reactions do work across tenants). You can, however, send an appropriate emote to any email that originated from someone in your organization (even if there are other externals on it).

In desktop Outlook, look for the smiley icon in the response area at the top right of a message in the preview pane or when you open it outright; Outlook Web App has a similar UI which might contain other extensions’ icons next to the smiley too.

There isn’t a could have been a meeting or a please take me off this email button, but whenever you click on the like, love, laugh etc icon, the reaction is visible to the originator of the mail. (Happy Silver Anniversary, btw, Bedlam DL3 – hope you get on the EBC wall)

To see what people have to say of the guff you send, look at the Notifications icon in the top right of Outlook / OWA, and as well as any mentions you may have from people who can’t type your name without putting an @ in front of it, you’ll see a summary of who has reacted to each message, and how.

Alternatively, look in your Sent Items and if you select a message you can see what reactions it has had; there isn’t an easy way to show reactions in the table view so you could see which messages are the most popular without having to preview or open them up. It probably can be done – though likely a palaver for limited utility.

Here’s a challenge – if you’re a ‘Softie and you got this in email, react to the message and see if we can break the internet.
Thank you for all that you do!

653 – Bookings with me, you, everybody

Posted on October 21, 2022 by ewand

Ideally, within an organization where people are expected to work together, they will use tools that have been around since the 1980s and actually share their calendar with their colleagues.

Outlook users can usually see blocks of when someone looks free or busy, when looking in the Scheduling Assistant tab on a meeting, though it won’t show external attendees and unless the attendees have chosen to share their calendar details, you won’t see anything other than tentative, free, busy or out of the office. Hopefully, some eejit won’t have blocked everyone else’s calendars by informing their colleagues of an impending day off.

When dealing with people in other time zones, there is a clue to whether they are likely to be able to join a meeting (quite apart from whether they have their calendar blocked or not) – the Work time setting is meant to show others what days and hours their expected work time is supposed to be.

Looking at the scheduling assistant grid, the light-grey area is supposed to be not-work time, and if there are any lighter-coloured blocks, that means they’re free and open for booking. Individually, you might also see their time zone displayed in their Profile Card when clicking on the user’s name in Outlook, Teams etc. Again, this is available for people in the same organization, so when dealing with external parties another approach will be required.

A variety of 3^rd party services exist to help people find time when others are free – a bit like a restaurant or hotel booking service, tools like Calendly or HubSpot (others are available) offer to expose your free time slots to selected external people, so they can find a slot that you are available and reserve it for a meeting with them. Office users could also use FindTime, which effectively sends a poll of suggested times to a group of people and gets them to vote on which one suits them best.

There’s also a Bookings application which is part of Microsoft 365; accessible via the app launcher icon (the grid of squares on the top left if you login on office.com using an account with an active M365 subscription). Bookings is designed to manage scheduling across a group of people – like in a hairdresser’s salon, where multiple members of staff could be available on different shift patterns, but a simple web UI is presented to an end customer so they can find a time when their favourite snipper is available.

Regular ToW contributor Ian Moulster spotted a new addition to Microsoft 365 which appeared in July, and though it may have common underpinnings, it’s a different offering to Bookings – called Bookings with me.

You might spot the Bookings with me notification in the top right of Outlook Web App, or try setting it up at outlook.office.com/bookwithme.

If available in your subscription, you can then set up a booking page with a menu of meeting types you want to accept – eg 20 minute 1:1 Teams calls in “public” (ie available to anyone who has your booking page URL – you might even add it to your email signature), or more specific meetings that are “private”, which you can choose to make available individually to sets of people. There are numerous of controls over how much time before and after the meeting, what days/times it can happen etc. Availability is synced with your Outlook calendar.

When you share the booking page or private URL with people, they just find themselves a time that’s free, and either sign in with a M365 work or school account or give another email address. If the latter, they will get an email with a verification code to enter into the booking form (M365 users are presumed already clean), and after confirming the code, they’ll get a meeting request sent from your calendar, with location and/or Teams details.

640 – Smart Dates

Posted on July 22, 2022 by ewand

For all the time that computers have been used, date handling has been a problem. Bad dates cause problems from sorting lists to processing payments, yet many systems force the user to figure out what it expects by way of date entry – from web sites which force 2-digits (a la 01/01/22 vs 1/1/22) to non-localised apps which assume a date format without allowing it to be changed?

If you ever say a date out loud like “this report is due by eight-one”, meaning 8/1 or 1^st August, then 91% of the world’s population will need to interpret that differently to how they represent dates, since most will expect the format to be day-month-year, or arguably most sensibly, year-month-day.

Try saving things like expense reports or invoices using the file name starting yy-mm-dd or even yyyy-mm-dd and they’ll be much easier to handle (aside from just sorting by created date, of course).

When a user enters a date into a Windows app, the vast majority will respect the format set by the operating system, known as the User Locale.

That doesn’t help too much if the author of a spreadsheet – for example – is in one locale and other users are elsewhere; if the default date format is numeric, then the field remains in the format of the author, and that may cause befuddlement.

Switching display format to Long Date – or even setting a shorter custom format – could avoid confusion. Under the covers, Excel still stores the date in a universal format, but people might interpret it incorrectly when display in a different format.

Other tools can handle dates in surprisingly smart ways – even since its first version in 1997, Outlook lets you enter text into date windows like a Due Date for reminders or tasks – any time you are presented a date field that lets you type as well as select a date from a calendar picker, you can put stuff in like tomorrow, 2 weeks, next Friday, third Tuesday in October etc. There are shorter versions – 2w, 3m 10d – or you can string things together, like Monday before Christmas.

Microsoft To Do has also has some date smarts; if you type in a new task to track, it can read dates and times out of your task description and automatically set due dates and Reminders.

It has other kinds of parsing – in 3 days etc – though not quite as comprehensive as Outlook’s. There are also a load of special dates recognised (at least in the US).

So far, this functionality is available on Windows and iOS apps and for the most part it’s really neat. If it detects a date you don’t like – you’re suggesting something may happen, rather than it is happening on 1^st May, for example – then just hit backspace to clear that association.

#639 – Macros, Ghosts and GALs

Posted on July 15, 2022 by ewand

Since the early days, Microsoft always kept an eye on what its competitors were doing. It was once de rigeur to produce “battlecards” which would show feature-by-feature how one product is better than its competitor, thus assuring the customer they should buy this one. Thankfully, times have mostly moved on to just building as good a product as possible and then let customers and the markets decide – sometimes, they get improved and honed over time to be the best out there, and sometimes they get dispatched to the boneyard as times move on.

In the late 1990s, Office and Exchange (and later, SharePoint) Server were seen as Microsoft’s entrants into the burgeoning “Groupware” market, which became subsumed into “Knowledge Management” c2000. Key competitors to Exchange & Outlook were Lotus Notes and Novell GroupWise, both of which came from being collab tools and gained email functions. Notes was arguably much more mature and feature rich even if the UI was sometimes clunky, GroupWise was much leaner but found a niche in several industries. Amazingly, GroupWise is still a thing and Notes evolved first into IBM Notes/Domino and was eventually sold off to now be HCL Notes and HCL Domino.

One of the early moves Microsoft made to elevate Office apps to more than just writing documents, was to try to make the docs more capable through adding Macros, and later, Visual Basic for Applications. This allowed a moderately skilful user to dabble in programming to make smarter applications centered around documents; what seemed like a good idea at the time unwittingly unleashed a wave of malware, where bad actors wrote macros to do undesirable things. Following the “Melissa” worm in 1999, Office stopped Macros running without asking the user for permission. Using Macros for anything more than tinkering never really took off.

Macros disabled entirely

Microsoft announced in February 2022 that all Office Macros in content received online would be disabled completely; this was temporarily rolled back in some test builds for some changes to be made in how it works, but for many, the warning will still be there if you open a Macro-enabled file that you’ve downloaded or been sent.

There are still some very useful Office macros out there, and if you do need to run one that you know is from a trustworthy source, there is a workaround – save the file to your PC locally, then right-click on it to look at the file’s properties, tick the “Unblock” option and apply that. You’ll now be able to choose to run the macro unencumbered.

One such handy macro was discussed back in December 2021 in ToW 611, and is used to find Ghost meetings – ie ones you have arranged but everyone has declined (or at least not accepted). The macro spins through all future meetings in your calendar and lists the ones you’ve organised but where you’re likely to be the only attendee who shows up. Particularly useful at this time of year if lots of people are about to take time off over the summer, and may have declined a few recurring meetings but you – as organiser – still have them in your calendar.

For the latest version of the macro, download the ZIP file to your machine and expand it (or just copy the XLSM file that’s within and put it somewhere else), do the property Unblock thing as above, open in Excel, click the button to allow content, then the Scan Calendar button and you’re all set. You still need to go into Outlook and look at the appropriate date then decide if you want to cancel those meetings or not.

Another more powerful macro – though a little more esoteric – is one which does bulk resolution against the Global Address List, so if you give it a list of display names and/or alias names, it will show the full name, title, department, office, email, and alias name of that person. Handy if you want to get the full details of everyone who is going to attend a meeting, but if you just have a longish list of names then you could just paste them in and see how it goes. This was covered back in ToW 575. One usage scenario recently was to estimate the number of people who were attending a group meeting, but were based at other offices and would therefore need accommodation.

Here’s an example output of over 500 names who were invited to a large meeting; by just providing their display names in column A, it took the sheet about 30 seconds to complete, with 10 identified as distribution lists and 50 unknowns who couldn’t be resolved, either due to no longer being in the GAL or because there were more than one possible name listed.

If you can manually find the unknown person/people in the GAL, then get their alias name and paste that into column 1 instead of the ambiguous display name, then try to run it again.

635 – Outlook Wunderbar and Full Screen

Posted on June 17, 2022 by ewand

Many Office users rely so much on Outlook, it’s their most-used application by far. Over the years, numerous other apps – such as Yammer, Slack or Teams – have presented other ways to collaborate and communicate yet with billions of messages being sent every day, email just doesn’t seem to slow down.

The bones of the current Windows release of Outlook date back to Outlook 97, with some dialogs and settings having changed little since even if the main UI has been refreshed over the years. One recent change was the further evolution of Outlook 2003’s “Wunderbar”, the menu on the bottom left of the main Outlook window that switched views between mail, calendar, tasks etc (yes, it really was called that internally – look in the Registry).

By Outlook 2016, the navigation bar had collapsed into a series of icons along the bottom, which did the same thing but took up less screen real estate. It’s long been possible to use keyboard shortcuts to jump between the options on the navigation bar – CTRL+1 will go to the 1^st one (usually Mail), CTRL+2 to the second and so on. You can reorder the options on the bar if you like, so CTRL+1 could be Calendar if that’s what’s most important to you.

Outlook 2021 changes things again – the navigation bar has moved to the side, in a UI design shared with both Outlook.com and the Microsoft 365 Outlook Web App.

Other apps can be pinned to the new bar, too – including things like the Org Explorer, which presents a much more graphical way of looking at the org chart than the old Address Book in Outlook.

Moving these icons to the side of the screen might help organize screen real estate; another option would be to collapse the Ribbon, so you only see the many icons and options along the top of Outlook, when you need to use them.

You could try Simplified Ribbon to reduce the size and hide some of the more esoteric functions.

Show tabs only reverts to a simple menu bar, and when you click on one of the options, the ribbon for that tab is displayed. You can toggle easily between Tabs Only and the full ribbon by pressing CTRL+F1. There are loads of other shortcuts for Outlook though some are a little obscure.

To truly maximize your screen area, try going into Full-screen mode; that removes the menu and ribbon at the top of the screen entirely, including the search box.

If you need to search your mailbox while in full-screen, press ALT to temporarily display the ribbon, and look for the highlighted keys that can jump to specific tab or function.

Press Q, then type your search, hit enter and you’ll return to your results in full screen again.

631 – Why does nobody share calendars?

Posted on May 20, 2022 by ewand

Back in the late 1980s/early 90s, IBM had an internal email system called NOSS – an implementation of PROFS, a text-only mainframe-based system delivered via a terminal.

Even in 1990, NOSS allowed any user to browse a hierarchical directory (showing contact info, job titles, manager/reporting relationships etc), email or instant message anyone, and look at their calendar to see what they were doing. It was 10 years before you could do all those things using Microsoft Windows and Office. In recent years, Big Blue’s email environment has seemingly been less happy.

When Microsoft Exchange first came out, email was handled with the Exchange client and calendaring was from Schedule+, which had been updated to support Exchange (and lives on in some backward Microsoft lingo, where people who start every sentence with “So,” ask you to send them an S+, meaning, invite them to a meeting). Outlook came along in 1996 and became the preferred and unified way to do email, calendars, address books etc.

Some organisations had a default policy when new mailboxes were created that their calendar was shared Read-only, so anyone in the company could see it. You could open someone’s calendar fully in Outlook or by viewing the scheduling tab in a meeting, where you will typically see if a list of people are available or not. Others might have it that only free/busy info is visible by default, and that is pretty sub-optimal.

With M365 in general, newly-created mailboxes have no calendar sharing set up, and the action is on the user to choose how to let co-workers see their info.

Be a nice person, and check to make sure your colleagues can view your calendar.

Ideally, share so that others will see the title and location of any appointment; useful when someone is trying to arrange a meeting, as within the schedule view they can figure out if you are likely to be able to make the proposed meeting time – if your diary is full of blocks marked busy or tentative, they’ll have no idea if you really are in a meeting or have just marked time to do something that you might be happy to move. Or had a colleague’s FYI notice of being on holiday obliterate the view of your calendar.

In the early days of Exchange/Outlook, if you had read access to someone’s calendar, you could open up appointments, see who else was attending a meeting, download any attachments and so on, unless the appointment was marked “Private” – though it’s somewhat possible to open Private appointments programmatically if you know what you are doing.

Nowadays, calendar sharing is more granular – in Outlook Web App, go into Calendar and you’ll see the Sharing and permissions option, which will let you choose specific people and give them ability to see various details, or you can change the default for the whole organisation.

In full-fat desktop Outlook, click on the Share Calendar option on the ribbon, and you’ll get a 1990s-style dialog box allowing you to set the default permissions or to invite particular team-mates to have higher level access should you want them to know where you are and with whom.

If you choose titles & locations, viewers can’t open your appointments to peer inside, so can’t see who else is attending or what the body of the meeting says, but they can at least see if you’re likely to need travel time between meetings. See here for more info on calendar sharing & delegate access.

621 – Working Time Directive

Posted on March 11, 2022 by ewand

Time Zones have featured lots on ToW; in an epoch when everyone was holed up WFH, the relative time people were at became especially important when trying to meet with them. Sometimes, it’s unavoidable that meeting times are unpalatable to some attendees if they’re in a far-flung time zone, but it’s worth reminding yourself how distant they are when trying to find the best time slot to speak with them.

There are whole genres of mechanical watches which can display multiple time zones (check out GMT or World Time if horology is your thing), or you could rely on phone or computer-based aides-memoire, such as displaying multiple time zones alongside your calendar in Outlook, using the Windows Clock app with its world clock view, or even showing several clocks on the Windows task bar.

A new addition to the arsenal of time zone tooling is a neat feature that’s appeared in the contact card in Teams and Outlook, showing you what the time is for the person you’re looking at. The time displayed is set by the device they’re using, so if on Windows, that’s the Time Zone setting.

When travelling, rather than just manually winding the clock back or forward, it makes sense to set the correct time zone on your machine – either by allowing Windows to change it automatically or by specifically choosing it from the list.

If you have multiple time zones displayed in Outlook, you can switch between them from the settings page – just right-click on the timeline to the side of the calendar and choose Change Time Zone, or go to File | Options | Calendar and look for the settings in there.

When you swap them around inside Outlook, it will change the time zone on your PC.

In some parts of the world, there’s pressure to prevent “work” from creeping into personal time, meaning emails and other messages should be held back and not sent during what’s supposedly down-time. Ireland has published a “right to disconnect” code of practice, and Portugal even made it illegal for an employer to contact their workers outside of working hours.

If you’re using the right kind of Microsoft 365 subscription, Outlook can offer to delay emails you’re sending to people who are in different time zones – part of the Viva Insights package.

Choosing this action has a similar effect to the Delay Delivery option which is visible on the Outlook toolbar, except that it won’t need Outlook to be running; the regular Delay feature leaves a message in your Outbox folder, and that normally means the Outlook client needs to be running at the time you want it to be sent.

The Viva-powered delay option holds the message on the server until the allotted hour, and then delivers it to the recipients – handy if the sender is already outside their working hours by that point…

612 – New Year, New You (someday/maybe)

Posted on January 7, 2022 by ewand

“The years go by so fast, let’s hope the next beats the last”– a sentiment that rings so true over the last couple of new year celebrations. Whether setting resolutions to do new things, read more, lose weight, be a better human etc, we all tend to reflect, even if just trying to do the same things as before but a bit better. Steve Clayton’s Friday Thing for the end of December had some great tips on things to do and try in the coming year.

If we can’t reduce volume of professional communications (be that emails, Teams messages, whatever – just look at Steve cleaning his mailbox and removing >100,000 Sent Items from a single year), then maybe we could do a better job of managing the stuff that we have to deal with. Much ink has been spilled on how to be more effective and how to get things done, but one useful time/focus management principle to revisit is sometimes known as Eisenhower’s Matrix, of which a variety of depictions exist:

The premise is that any task has separate degrees of importance and urgency; we tend to prioritize urgent and overdue things versus things that are actually important. Discipline in task management can give us the clarity to not worry about seemingly urgent yet non-important tasks, and to stay focussed on things which are important, regardless of their urgency.

Carve out 75 minutes if you can – because this stuff is important – to watch Randy Pausch’s lecture on Time Management, with the context that when it was recorded, he knew he only had weeks left to live: talk about prioritizing important vs urgent.

How you put time and focus management into practice will differ depending on your own style and what tools you want to use. For the Windows / Microsoft 365 user, there are a few quick wins to consider:

If you use flags in Outlook to mark messages needing your attention, think about setting a “Follow Up” search folder as the top of your list of Favorites. You can even make the Follow Up folder the default one so Outlook always opens that instead of your Inbox. You could try setting up a scheduled task to open your Follow Up folder every day (since most of us don’t restart our PCs very often, Outlook will typically stay running; this way will make sure you’ve got Follow Up open first thing every day)
Take better notes – remember that you can quickly create a OneNote notes page from an Outlook appointment; we’ll see some improvements coming to the original OneNote client in 2022, so if you’ve switched to using the ~~Metro~~ ~~Modern~~ Store app “OneNote for Windows 10”, then it’s worth revisiting the original. Do check out the fantastic OneCalendar addin to desktop OneNote, which helps you look back on notes you took.
Remember that Outlook Tasks and Microsoft To Do integrate with each other; see the Ignite session for how to use them more effectively. You can also highlight action items (from your meeting notes?) in OneNote, and quickly create Outlook tasks. While Tasks and To Do items don’t quite have full interop, there are 3^rd party solutions out there and there are lots of templates in PowerAutomate which can do groovy things with Tasks, notifications and so on.
The Windows 11 Clock app has a nice new “Focus sessions” time management feature, to help you concentrate on important tasks, and it now supports signing in with Microsoft 365 credentials so you can see your corporate Tasks / To Do items in the list.

To help maintain focus, you can quickly set your Teams status to Do Not Disturb by hovering over the application icon on your Taskbar and clicking the appropriate status.

If you’re easily distracted, you could also switch Outlook to Offline mode so you don’t get any new email whilst you focus – a good alternative to closing Outlook down altogether, since you may need it for whatever work you’re doing.

Go into Outlook, under the Send / Receive menu, click the Offline button on the taskbar and you won’t get any more email until you click the Offline button again to reverse the process and re-emerge later.