Take Control: Using Outlook Effectively

Okay, so welcome, and today we are going to talk about how to maintain control using Outlook. And so if many of you probably are using Outlook for email, calendars, sending files, receiving files, all sorts of things. We tend to live in Outlook a lot if we're Outlook users, and so there's a whole lot of power in this application to to talk about in terms of making life a little bit easier and giving you a bunch of ways to kind of manage your email and be a better user, not only of email, but also the calendar. Because I find that I use my calendar a ton. And I also find that people don't do such a good job of thinking through certain things. If I'm gonna send out a meeting request to Mary, I'm gonna put the location, whether that's the phone number to call or whatever. If you don't do that, then if you're doing a, especially like a Zoom meeting or something, then everybody's gonna go, wait, I didn't get the link, where is it? So put it in the calendar event. And we're gonna just talk about little kind of rules like that. So I find this tweet that I picked up a while back amusing because While for the rest of the world, maybe you can declare inbox zero, it's very hard to maintain inbox zero. I think that's aspirational, but not necessary. It's more being organized and being able to find stuff when you need it. And then this tweet, he suggests inbox infinity where you don't actually respond to things. For lawyers, you don't get to do that. While there may be other business people in the world who feel like this is an option, not so much for lawyers. You are compelled under the ethics rules to be responsive. So thinking about kind of just in general, how do you deal with email? In the same way that you deal with your Your mail, if you think about back to the mail days, we were always told, you know, deal with each piece of paper once. So as much as you possibly can, try to deal with email once. And so if it's something you can read and delete, great. If you can act on it quickly, then take 2 minutes and respond to it. Now the reality is that a lot of best practices regarding email all centers around kind of the concept of managing time in hunks. So you'll see, you know, C-level executives say, "I only check email 3 times a day," or whatever. We do get in the habit of checking email all the time and have kind of a Pavlovian response to it. So if you can break up your day and chunk it up to where you do respond, people will start to understand that You're not available 24/7, and you create this expectation when you respond to email immediately. If it's not urgent, then, you know, set it aside. I actually turn off a lot of the notifications in Outlook so it's not constantly popping up, beeping at me and doing stuff like that. I also, you'll see from my screen when I share it, you'll see that I don't have those, the little previews of email, and that's because I don't wanna see an email come into my inbox and get distracted reading it it right there on the screen. I want to be a little bit more intentional about opening it so I don't get distracted and want to respond immediately. There's a lot of ways to kind of flag an email to come back to later. There's a lot of ways to auto-respond that I'm going to show you, and then if all possible, forward it to somebody who can take care of it. So that's the delegation part, and that's hard for a lot of us to do, but if you can delegate the activities to somebody who can do it for you. And then we also— people sign up for email newsletters, and they're great, but if you find that you've created a rule that puts your email newsletter into a folder and you never read them, maybe unsubscribe from it. But because I guess my feeling is, as much as possible, I want my inbox to be a communication tool, as in I can respond to the person. So anything that's unidirectional, just coming in and sitting there for me to read or deal with, you know, later. There's other methods of getting that information. I use an RSS feed reader, which is a totally different subject. I do have a tutorial on that in an article if you're interested. And like I said, schedule a time to check your email if possible. A lot of people have aspirations for doing that. And this is all, you know, what you can get done. So we can't control what other people do. You know that you send out emails with specific questions to people and they don't respond to the questions that you ask. You'll also see people sending— responding to an email that you sent them 6 months ago with a brand new topic. So first thing is when you're sending out an email Make sure you use a descriptive subject line, something that gives the person a sense of urgency, if any deadlines are kind of applicable to that particular missive. And don't go back and find an email thread from 6 months ago and respond to it because that gets very confusing. So use a descriptive subject line as much as possible. Get to the point quickly. What do you need from this person? What are you asking? That'll help them kind of know what they're on the hook for. The reality is a lot of us are reading our email on telephones, or not telephones, these things, you know, our little smartphones. And it's a much smaller screen, so we have to kind of think, what's gonna get someone to open it and get to the point? And then the other thing is this concept of closing the loop. When you send an, and I don't wanna call this person out, but I just got an email It was sent to 5 people. We were supposed to do a presentation in person last week. It got canceled. And so now they're saying, what kind of time do you have available the week of the 30th? I have to admit, I just put that email aside. I flagged it to follow up. But for me to go in and look at my calendar and type in all the available times I have for the week of the 30th is a huge imposition on my time. So in a perfect world, she should have sent something that gave me a way to just check a box. And there's lots of different tools that we're going to talk about that you can do that. So when you, you know, when you're asking someone to spend some time coming up with something that they're asking you to do, it's a bit of an imposition. So anything you can do to make it easy for someone to respond to you, and then keep it brief. That's the whole kind of 5 sentences concept. And especially within intra-organization, send links to the documents instead of attaching a bunch of files. You probably have some way to, you know, get into the server or whatever, that every time you attach a file, it, you know, then that person is gonna have to figure out where to save it and all that. So if you can send a link, I think that's a better better thing to do. So the other thing I want to point out is that we all make mistakes in terms of sending out emails to the wrong person. It's very easy to do, and lawyers have gotten in trouble. Above the Law has a whole section devoted to email whoops— associates sending emails that they meant to send to a partner or internal person to a reporter. These things come up over and over, and there's a couple of ways to keep yourself from doing this. So one thing is that you can look at what you're doing. So one major issue that is when you type in the to line in Outlook, it starts autocompleting for you, and it is really easy to pick the wrong person from that dropdown. I'm going to show you two methods to reduce that factor. Then there's the reply versus reply all. I actually just read North Carolina has an ethics opinion that says that if somebody sends you an email and they CC their client and you hit reply all, it's impermissible communication because you've now had communication with that person's client without permission. So be really careful with reply all. Not just for that ethics opinion, but for a variety of reasons. The other thing I will note that I've seen a lot of lately is someone forwarding a thread and not reviewing the thread before they sent it. And if you're forwarding a thread, be aware that you can edit the content before you send it. So people are forwarding threads with stuff that I don't think they meant for me to see. And it happens a lot. And so in addition to kind of understanding reply or reply all, is also looking at a thread that forwarding and editing out stuff that people might not want to see. We'll talk about BCC. I really don't like BCC. The other thing is we're emailing from mobile devices. A lot of times, since my default is to reply instead of reply all on my phone, sometimes I don't notice that there were other people in the thread and I don't hit reply all. So when you're emailing from mobile devices, you just have to kind of slow down and be careful. Which is the lack of attention and impulse control. We're trying to get things done. I used to use a keyboard command, Ctrl+S, to send email, but I had to make myself stop doing that because I could ramble off an email and hit Ctrl+S so fast that I didn't actually check all the things that we should check when you're sending out an email, like who's it to, do a grammar check, do a spell check. You know, this is professional communication. So when I say don't BCC, there are a couple of bar associations that have put out ethics rules that say it's okay to BCC. However, I just would avoid doing it. I think it can come back to bite you. So what I suggest is forward the thread and don't BCC your client. Which happens, but the problem is if you BCC your client and your client replies all, then everybody's in kind of a pickle. That actually happened. There was a case in Massachusetts called Cherm v. Cohn, and Mr. Cohn, the client, responded all when he was BCC'd. It was a sticky wicket because is it waiver of privilege? There are a lot of different questions that came out of that particular instance. In a perfect world, don't BCC somebody, just forward it. The other thing is Outlook gives you a false sense of security because it gives you this recall button, and recall is, um, doesn't work. It works internally to a certain extent. So the only time Outlook recall actually works is if you are working, if you're emailing someone within the firm and they haven't read it yet, then it will actually delete the unread copies. But if they already read it, they already got it. Outside of the firm, outside of your own Exchange server, doesn't work at all. In fact, all it does is send notice to the person that you tried to recall a message, which means they will more than likely definitely read what you sent them before. So unfortunately, unlike Gmail, there's no undo button. We're looking forward into quarter 4 of Office 365 actually being able to use recall, but I don't think I'm ever gonna trust it fully. So that's where we really just try to focus on avoiding all of this. And so how do we avoid all this? Couple of different techniques. First, before you hit Ctrl+S or hit the Send button, check and make sure the recipients are correct and that it's going to the correct email address. So on occasion, you may be representing someone who has left a company and started a new company. Because of the Outlook autocomplete feature, it's going to hang on to their old email address even though you updated your contacts with the new information for the client, Outlook still remembers that old address because those addresses are saved in a completely different place. So make sure you've got the correct recipients. Make sure you've corrected for the reply levels, whether you need to reply or reply all. Reread your email. Make sure that the tone is appropriate, that you've checked for spelling errors. Make sure your signature block is in there because in some cases, depending on how you send an email, for instance, if you're in a Word document and you go File, Share, and it pulls it up in Outlook, it doesn't apply your signature. It's kind of an irritation. So you have to go and insert your signature. And just kind of take a breath, slow down, and think about what you're doing is probably the best methodology. Now, there are some things you can do about this autocomplete business. You can turn it off. And every time I tell audiences you can turn off autocomplete, they kind of look at me like, "Well, yeah, but it's really useful." And I will agree. It is, it is a useful feature because you start typing in the to line and it just fills it in for you. And that's great. You can go into the autocomplete list and delete the whole thing, and then it won't fill in for you, and you can turn it off. Or on an individual basis, you can— when you start typing the to line and you see this little X, click on the X. It'll remove it from the autocomplete, which can be helpful. The other thing, and I did not come up with this tip on my own, my friend Heidi Alexander came up with this, and I think it's brilliant. And so What it is is when you start an email, put in the CC line the word draft. You can put whatever you want, but draft is easiest. So what happens is if I leave draft, which is not an email address, and I click on send, then it basically says, I can't send this, this isn't an email address. And then you can go back and that'll cause you to have to go check what you're doing. So it won't send it right away. And then you go, oh, let me go check and make sure everybody who I meant to get this is getting it and that I reviewed it and all that. But it'll just kind of slow you down. So what I'm going to do now is bounce out of the PowerPoint, which I gave to Mary to share with you all, and I'll have some articles and, and some other instructions for you plus the recording. But we're actually going to go into Outlook and look at stuff now. Keeping in mind that I am using my personal and live Outlook, so I'm actually going to go and see what's in there. Nothing exciting. I am not a lawyer. I do not practice law, so I do not have quite the level of confidentiality. I wouldn't suggest you share your inbox with a whole crowd of people, but I'm going to because I might be crazy. So this is the calendar event for this. And here's my inbox. It's a bit of a mess right now because I'm sure I, like many of you, are getting a whole lot of emails at this time. And so we are, you know, kind of scrambling to keep up with stuff. One thing you'll note, if when I start up Outlook, I actually have it set to open in my calendar. And so when I open Outlook during the day, it actually opens first in my calendar, not my inbox. And there's a reason for doing that. Again, when we talk about checking email at certain times, I don't wanna be hit with what's in my inbox first thing when I open it up. So you can actually set it to open wherever you want to. So if you go into File, and mine's gonna look a little bit different from yours, but it's mostly the same. I'm using Outlook for Office 365. I believe y'all are using Outlook 2016, but it's mostly in the same place and the options are the same. So we're gonna go into File, Options, and then we're gonna go into Advanced, and then Outlook Start and Exit, you can actually browse and say I want to go and I want to have it open in my calendar. So instead of having it automatically open in my inbox, I'm going to have it in my calendar, and then I'm going to click OK. And now when I open Outlook, it's going to go straight to my calendar. I can kind of review my day, see what's going on, and then go into my inbox. So it's just a little kind of tip to help you kind of control things. So another thing I want to show you is you can have as many signatures as you want to, and some of them can be helpful. So if you again go into my— again, mine is a little bit different, but if you go into File, Options, and then for your mail, you can scroll through and find your signatures. Oh, when I said you can turn off autocomplete, this is where you do it. Empty the autocomplete list and uncheck this box. So for signatures, you click here And then you can see that I have a couple of different signatures. So your firm may actually force a particular signature or they tell you what signature to use, but you can have multiple signatures. So I've created one with kind of a warning, don't forward, which I can switch to easily. I have for new email my full signature block, and then for responses, I have mostly my full signature block, and the reason is because sometimes when emails get forwarded around and things like that, the email of the person gets kind of lost in the shuffle, and so I want people to be able to reach me by phone and email. A lot of people don't put their email address in their signature block. I usually suggest that you do just to make it really easy for somebody. Also put your phone number because I'm getting my phone to look at my email to find a signature block to contact somebody and there's, their phone number's not in there, I may not be able to get back in touch with them as quickly because I'm going to have to go like search through my Outlook to find the last time they sent me something with their full signature. So those are the reasons that I kind of like having multiple signatures. And so what happens is when I go to send a new email it automatically adds my email, the full signature block for outgoing email and new emails. But if I just kind of mouse over this and right-click, then you can see I can change it. So if this was something that I, this was confidential, then I could just right-click and easily change the signature block. You don't have to go into the Insert menu and Signature and pick them. You just kind of mouse over, right-click, and change it like that. So that's a quick tip. You may also have different signatures for different people, so you can get creative with the signatures. So the next thing I want to show you is the Quick Access Toolbar, and I was showing this to Mary yesterday. I get a little overly geeky with the Quick Access Toolbar, which is probably right around here. If you can't see it, then you may have it above the ribbon. So look up in this space. I prefer to have it below the ribbon because I think it's a little bit easier to see. But what this does is it just gives you quick click access to things that you do all the time that get buried in the ribbon menus. So for For instance, there's this really cool little button called Close All Items. And I don't know about y'all, but I find myself with a boatload of open emails at the end of the day or even the middle of the day. And I get confused about, you know, like I've got a ton open. So this Close All Items is actually in the View menu, and then it's all the way over here, Close All Items. But I wanna, I don't feel like having to go find it. So I added it to my Quick Access Toolbar. So the easy thing to do is right-click on the tool and then I've already added it so it's grayed out, but you would add to Quick Access Toolbar. So once I do that, I'm going to click this and you can't see how many I had open, but I had quite a few. If you had something in draft, it's gonna pull it up and say, do you wanna save this email? That is a lifesaver because a lot of times I will be responding to people, reading new email, going off, working on a document, coming back, that kind of thing. And I forget about that email that I started to draft and needed to go find some more information. And then I kind of forget about it 'cause we get crazy busy. So when I click that little close all items, anything that I haven't finished is gonna pop up and ask me if I wanna save it. And when I go, oh shoot, no, I wanna finish it. Or I can save it as a draft, but that's one of the things that I have in my quick access toolbar. Another one, I can go straight into my documents from Outlook, 'cause I'm that lazy, or I can go and create a new Office document right from here and just open up Word. Yes, I can use my toolbar too, but that takes more clicks than this. And like I said, I kind of live in Outlook. So one thing, if you want to add tools to this, right-click and then actually click on this little arrow and then click on More Commands. And you can see all the common things, the popular commands that people use. Now, for me to find some of the stuff that I have, like My Documents or New Office Document, took a little bit more work because these aren't all your options. These are just the popular ones. So you can say, and I don't know why, commands not in the ribbon. So you can assign a task if you use Outlook Tasks, you can categorize things. So we'll add that to the Quick Access Toolbar. And so I literally just kind of went through this list looking at things that look like it might be useful to me. And we'll add this one. And then you also have, in addition to Commands Not in the Ribbon, All Commands. Now this is a bit intimidating. This is every single thing that Microsoft Office does. So you got a lot of stuff. And that's how I got that little button to open a new document. So, you know, one day when you're bored, you can go through and figure out what you can Add to your Quick Access Toolbar. And so now you see the categories and flags are here. And that'll be useful as I'm kind of going through my daily life and I don't have to go hunt for things. So the next thing I want to show you is this thing that I call the magic eraser button. So I'm gonna hop over into Oh, any old website. Let's see. Well, I don't want to— we'll just look at the forecast in Chicago for fun. So say I copied some text and I'm gonna paste it into Outlook. We do this all the time. So I'm gonna open a new email and I'm going to paste that text in there. And sometimes it adds all sorts of weird formatting, and because Outlook— the editor in Outlook actually uses Microsoft Word as the background editor, and it's by default HTML, and so it will adopt weird formatting. If you ever find that it does weird stuff when you paste in and you want to control the formatting, just select the text and then find this little button called Clear All Formatting and click it. And now that turns it into plain text. You won't fight with the formatting because you've turned it to plain text. Now I can, you know, highlight it, bullet point it, whatever, and, and make it look like the rest of the text that I'd already typed into the email. So I love what I call the magic eraser. It's also— it's actually called Clear All Formatting. So the next thing I'm gonna show you is a methodology for sorting through your email and getting rid of a bunch of it. And so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select From, and then if I go through and I said I don't like to get email newsletters, but that doesn't mean I don't get any. So I have a bunch of newsletters that don't need to be in my inbox. So I just select them all. Now, that was me— I can either go all the way down, I can hold the Ctrl key and select individual ones, or if I start at the top and I hold down the Shift key, it will select all of them. And once I do that, I'm going to use this tool that I'll show you called SimplyFile. I'm only, I'm gonna limit the amount of add-ons that I show you because your IT department probably will hate me. But this is one I would suggest you lobby for. So basically, it recognizes what folder it should go in. Yes, I can drag and drop these to the correct folder, but I'll show you why that's a pain. 'Cause I have, and many people do, a ton of folders. And the other thing about dragging and dropping is I may dump it in the wrong folder. So that's really easy to do. So I really like this add-on. It's called Simply File. It's like $40. If all of you get it, there's probably some sort of discount for multiple licensing. And it just sits here and it understands your folder structure. It actually learns your folder structure. So I click on that and it pushes them all into that folder easily. And I can get through my inbox this way really easily. So if, if it doesn't recognize the folder, I just click here and it'll give me some more options. If I still don't have it recognized, I will type in— this is also good because sometimes I I have such deeply nested folders, it's kind of hard to find. So I will fill a message and it will file all of Ashley's emails in her folder. So I love SimplyFile. It makes my life much, much easier. The other thing, and I showed this to Mary, that SimplyFile does, so let me find something for Mary. And what we're gonna do is I'm going to reply, "Thanks," and then I'm gonna click Send. So another thing that SimplyFile does that, and again, this is not built into Outlook, this is something that you'll wanna ask your IT department to get, but you'll see that it has many useful options. One is helping you get email where it's supposed to. The other is when I reply to an email, I can, it first tries to figure out which folder to go to and it didn't do such a good job with that, but we'll find the right folder. And then I can send and file my response. So if you have a habit of BCCing yourself, so you put your sent mail in the folder with the rest of the client matter, SimplyFile will let you immediately folder that item. It will also give you the item, the option to send the email File your sent message and file the original. So, or you can send and save it in your Sent Items, so it'll go into Sent Items and into the appropriate folder. So lots of different options there. The other thing that this does, and really the reason that I have it turned on, because you don't have to have it turned on, you can turn this off, but one of the reasons I have this turned on is because again, it stops me So if I'm responding to Mary and I add somebody as CC and then I didn't really check it, before I send it, it pops up and asks me what I want to do, which also stops me and makes me think, oh, did I need to CC somebody else, or do I need to check the message I just sent, or did I really do a good job spell checking? And then I can just click on this little X, dismiss it, review again, and then send along. So that's another reason I really like SimplyFile. So this, this whole concept of sorting by From is very helpful, and then after you sort by From, the next thing is you can sort by Subject. And that gives you a whole different view. And so if you have folders based on projects, like this one, there's a whole bunch of different people in this thread. I don't— I have folders based on subjects for this, and so this one goes into Tech Show, and SimplyFile does the rest of the work for me. So at any rate, you get the idea. You can sort by From and Subject, and you get a lot of use out of that, just clearing out your inbox. The other thing you can do is— I'm gonna right-click in this area and click on this thing called Field Chooser. And what Field Chooser does, it gives me some more fields to sort by. So say I wanted to see who was CC'd. So I'm going to drag that up and click on it and see who was CC'd so that maybe this email is not my responsibility. Maybe enough other people were CC'd to where I was just kind of aware of something, but it was really for someone else, which happens. So you can add additional fields for sorting. If you don't want to keep CC in there, you just right-click on it again Actually, you don't even have to do that. You don't right-click, you just kind of hold your mouse on there and drag it, and you get this X, and it takes out that column. So I know that this is again how I try to attack my inbox, and I do this every Friday. It's not Friday. So now the next thing is turning email and calendar into tasks and email into calendar events. So obviously most of you probably know that you can drag an item over into your calendar. So I'm just going to drag this email over into the calendar. But the other thing to be aware of is that this had an attachment, um, And sometimes it'll bring that attachment over, but sometimes it won't. So you need to make sure that your attachments get put in with this, and then you can obviously make the changes. This creates an appointment for you, but not an event for other people, just to keep that in mind. You can also take this and drag it into your tasks if you use tasks, or you can drag it into your contacts if you don't have a contact for that person, and it gives you a little bit of context around this particular contact. By default, it just pulls their email. If the person has a signature block, you can copy and paste the information into their contact if you don't have that person in your contacts already. Now I will admit I don't do that. What I do is I use this other little add-on called EverContact, and when I get an email from someone that has a signature block that's not in my contacts already, it dumps it in there for me. Again, this is something that will work with Outlook 2016 and something that you might ask your IT department to look into because it not only puts their contact into my contacts for me from their signature block automatically. But if someone changes their signature, it will update my contacts, and then I can go and review it and tell it whether I want to accept it or not. But EverContact kind of saves me from having to take all these steps to add people to my contacts. The next thing I want to show you, and I use this a good bit, is this whole flag for follow-up. So if I sort You can see that I have a number of things flagged for follow-up. And so, like this one, so it's easy for me to go through and kind of see what I flagged. But if I go back and sort the regular way, so for this one I probably need to take action on it, but not yet. This program isn't due until the end of the month. So what I'm going to do is I'm gonna go over here, and if I click on the flag, it just is a regular flag. If I right-click on it, then you get all sorts of options. And so I can add a reminder, and you can— actually, there's more than just follow-up. You can do other things. I don't know that many people use those, and I frankly don't. You can create a start date and a due date and a reminder. So from a tickler perspective, this actually gives you a lot more options than your calendar. So if you have a habit of dragging emails into calendar to remind you to do something, try flags because again you have kind of a start date, a due date, and you can have a kind of middling reminder. So it'll pop up a reminder and also pop up the due date, and it'll change the flag to a different color if it's due. You can also set sounds that you want it to make and all of that. So that's why you can also add it to here as well. So yet another thing that I use a lot of— if and when you all go to Office 365, there's some other things that you will like about the flags because they actually pull those emails over or show you the emails you flagged into a to-do list, which is very useful. Okay, next thing I'm going to show you is some automation tips. And so the first thing I want to show you is this thing called Quick Parts, and I use Quick Parts all the time. So if somebody emails me and asks me to set up a consultation, then I just respond to the email or open a new email and go to my QuickPart, and then I grab the text and send it. And so the way you do this is you have to save text to QuickParts. So we're going to go and create a new email, and I'm going to say, "Hi," I'm out of the office. Not. So say that's something you send a lot. Maybe something like how to dress for court or whatever., and then I can select the text, and then it's in the Insert menu, and then under Quick Parts over here, and you click on this, and then you go all the way to the bottom and say Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery, and then you want to say, um, Out of Office. But this is something you enable, and I'm going to show you how to make it even faster. So, "Out of Office," and say OK. And now when I want to send that message again, and again I added this to my QuickPart gallery, I can dump in the text. So as you can see, I have quite a number when people ask me for consultations. When someone wants to do a Zoom meeting and I don't feel like going and looking for my Zoom information, if I need to drop in information about Zoom with a dial-in, I use Calendly to schedule appointments. I've got all sorts of different things. This is one I use as an example, how to dress for court. Anything that you wanna be able to basically create a kind of template text for, you can add it as a QuickPart. Now, to be aware, QuickParts are, they live on your individual computer. So if you go to a different computer or you go to OWA, your QuickParts aren't there. So it's, that issue has been fixed in Office 365, but for now, just keep in mind that Your Quick Parts live on your computer with that particular install of Outlook, so they're not anywhere else, but it's still super helpful. In fact, I was using Outlook through a browser the other day and I didn't have my Quick Parts and I really felt a little stymied. I'm really dependent on them. And, you know, again, I added it to my Quick Parts or my Quick Access Toolbar You'll note that it's not in here right now, and the reason for that is, is because it is context sensitive. So there's nothing I could do with Quick Parts where I am. If I click on a new email and I put my cursor in the body, then my Quick Parts show up. So a lot of your little toolbars, if you add it to your Quick Access Toolbar, keep in mind that it's only gonna show up when it's something that you can use, which may be a little confusing. So the other thing I wanna show you is Quick Steps. And Quick Steps are up here, and Microsoft has given you a bunch of kind of pre-built Quick Steps. And so I've got things like, if I wanted to add this to the calendar, I just select the message, Add to Calendar. I don't have to drag and drop, and I make the change to the date and save and close. Her email goes nowhere. I could say Add to Calendar and delete the email since the text of the email goes into the calendar event. I could also click on— I created one called Reply and Delete. I respond and it deletes the original. Not gonna do that either, but if you just need to respond but you don't need to hang on to the entire email thread, you can just Reply and Delete. So I'll show you one It's a little complex, so I'm gonna create new and I'm gonna call this one, um, I'm Busy. No one will see this but you. So you could send out a defensive out-of-office message, but this is also like if you're sitting here just and somebody asks you to do something and you need to respond to them but you don't have time to deal with it right now, you can create a quick step to respond to the person. So what I'm gonna do first is The first action is Reply, 'cause this is something I'm gonna use to reply. So I just have a bunch of different options. I'm gonna scroll down to Reply. And then I'm going to click Show Options. And in the options, I'm going to put some auto-texts in there. Like, if I can spell adequately. Okay, so I have basically said I can't respond to you right now, but I flagged it for follow-up and Amy's CC'd. So then that'll actually automatically respond. The next thing I want to do is actually not lie, so I'm going to add a CC and I'm going to add Amy. And then I'm going to add a flag for follow-up. And then I can click Finish. So now when I get an email and I don't have time to respond to that person, but I do wanna let 'em know I got it, I flagged it, and all that, Whoop. I just select that email, choose this quick step, and it responds to the person, it CCs Amy, and it puts in that text for me, and I just click send. So that's quick steps, and you can build a lot of interesting things into quick steps. So that you can save yourself steps. So you can get pretty creative with it and save yourself some time. So the other thing, and this is a little complex and we're running low on time, so I'll send you the instructions, but you can actually set this up to where you create a template and it auto-responds to certain people. For the people who get the info@ emails from the, the main box for your firm, things like that, they can set up an auto response that basically says, thank you for contacting the Southern Environmental Law Center. We are in receipt of your email and will respond as soon as possible. Please keep in mind that anything sent to us through our web form is not held in confidence until we have a client relationship, or something like that. You can get all sorts of crazy automating stuff. And if you have people in your firm who need that kind of instruction, I can show you. The other thing I do, and this is kind of jerky, I wouldn't do it with everybody, I do it with people who I don't have time to figure out my availability, is insert my calendar. And this is only because I use my calendar a lot. So I'm going to respond to her and she might have said, "When do you have available?" And so I don't have time to look, so I'm going to go to the Insert button and I'm going to click on Calendar and then I'm going to specify a date range. So she says, "When do you have next week between Monday and Wednesday?" Do that and choose my dates, show availability only. And what it does is it basically is a slightly passive-aggressive way of going, "Here's my availability. I've got these times free. Everything else, I'm real busy. You pick. You tell me what works for you." Again, it's— I wouldn't necessarily do this with clients, but for other people who don't have access to your calendar, you don't have time to like figure all this stuff out. It's a quick and easy way to show your availability. That only works if you're really good about scheduling. So the next thing I want to do is show you— I think you probably are, are familiar with search, but just keep in mind that the default when you search is your current mailbox, and so you can quickly change that over to subfolders or all Outlook items. So if I wanted to click on all Outlook items and I can search for Heidi, that is gonna show me every single email, but also which folder it's in. So I can see which folder it's in and then any calendared items, her contact information. That's a really bad search 'cause it's far too broad. So if it's far too broad, then you start whittling it down. And so you can go over here and do an advanced find. Then you have all sorts of options in terms of specific words, where they are, who it's from, who it's to, where I am. And all that. So you can, you can get really granular. And of course you can do words in subject, you can do date range, all this kind of stuff. So the search is super powerful in Outlook. And yes, I'm getting a lot of alerts. I signed up for these because it is useful, but I should use something else. The other thing I want to show you is categories. So Outlook categories are useful because, like for instance, I, I was the chair of ABA Tech Show this year and I got emails from a million people. So I created a little Quick Step that applied a category called Tech Show and it also put it in the folder for me so I didn't have to do it. So every time I got an email that had to do with Tech Show, I just clicked it and it added the category. So if I go go into the TechSoup folder, you can see that these are all categorized to TechSoup. Now, here's the reality. We get emails and we put them into a single folder. But they may belong in two folders. But there's really no way other than going through a couple of steps to copy and paste and, you know, and then it's really hard to actually put an email into two folders. But they may have to folders that they should be in. The other thing is we want to add some intelligence to an email. So you can use categories for this. So if you— I'll open this— and so I can categorize this as, and we'll say it's class, and then I can also say it's consulting. And so here Now, in addition to the folder that I put in, I've also added some keyword intelligence in terms of my own subject categorization. And the way you create them is to just go into all categories, and then it has a bunch of defaults that are totally useless, and you can create as many as you want by clicking on new. Or if you go into one that was already created, um, you can rename it, or in this case, I'll just delete it. I don't even know what that was. So then as you get emails, you can categorize them. And as you can see, here's the category. So I can also sort by categories. If you wanted to do a search across categories, you can actually again click on search, and then I can search for anything that was categorized as "cle" or "class" or "tech show." And because of the setup that I have, I may— things may not be quite available to it, but usually that works. Then the other thing is that you can create a search folder, and I use search folders a lot more for things like emails from my boss, where sometimes it goes into a folder based on him, or it goes into a folder based on the topic. And so I can create search folders, and they're automatically created, and you'll have a couple of ones that are created for you. And so I basically created a search folder, so if I flag something for follow-up, even if I put it in a folder, and you can see that I can also see where, which folder it's in, anything I flagged for follow-up across all my calendars, all of my everything, is in one place because of the search folder. And you can create search folders for categories. Create them for anything. And the way you do this is you right-click, because it would be lovely if Microsoft was consistent with how you do things, but they're not. So right-click, click New Search Folder, and then it's got a bunch of options, or you can create a custom one. You can choose your criteria. So we're gonna— we can call this Heidi. We'll pick on Heidi again today., and then the criteria, and it can be words in the subject field and message body, or subject field only, from specific people, and you can give it all these criteria. So basically the same advanced search options that you have, you have here, and then you create this search folder, and then you can basically run a search, but it's kind of a consistently available search. And then if I want to add it to my favorites, I just drag it like I did up to here. And now I have it, so I don't even have to go all the way down into search folders. I just have it up in my favorites. So we'll go back into my scary inbox. So a couple of quick calendar tips and then we'll be done. Poor Charity, I'm really picking on her. So sometimes you will get an email and they'll— the person will say, "When do you have time to meet?" And before you go negotiating availability, I usually just try to cut it off. So, or somebody will send you an email, you negotiate availability, and then the person says, "Well, I'll send you a calendar event," and they never do. Again, I'm just real proactive about adding things to the calendar, so I'll open it, and instead of responding to her, I'm going to go up and I'm gonna click on this little button, which is Reply with Meeting, and what that does is it responds to the person and sets it up as a calendared event with her invited. I just change the times and send it off. Now it's on both of our calendars. And so a lot of times I find that, that useful to just kind of cut things off. If we've figured out when we're gonna meet, then I do that. The other thing is if I'm going to ask someone to meet with me I don't send them a new email. I send them a calendar request. So you just go into new items and send an appointment— or not an appointment, a meeting. And so instead of sending an email to begin with, I send them something for their calendar. If they don't use their calendar, I don't even care. I, I do, and I need it on mine, so I try to be really proactive with getting things on my calendar. One last thing, if you do send out a meeting like I did with Mary and I want to see if she has responded to me, I can open this up. Like if I go, I don't remember seeing that she accepted this invitation. It opens this up, go into scheduling assistant, and then if she hasn't responded, it'll show that she hasn't responded to me. So I use the scheduling assistant a lot. The other thing that I use the scheduling assistant a lot for is— let me go and create a new event. So say I'm going to invite multiple people to join me for something. I'm gonna go and send a new meeting, and if these are all people internal, like Eric and Amy, instead of trying to figure out whether they're available, you can just go into the scheduling assistant And if they use their calendar, I don't have to share calendars. I don't have to get permission to view their calendars or anything else. I can just see from a block of time that yep, they're available and so am I. But these other times they aren't. So I don't have to find out that they're not available. As long as they're in your Exchange server, you can do this really easily. So I showed you most everything that I was going to show you. There's always something left, but I will let you go in the respect of your time. And so if you need to get in touch with me, please feel free to do so. I will finish this recording and send it off to Mary. And, um, good luck and happy outlooking. Catherine, thank you so much.