Randy Dean shows how to disable Outlook's sound and pop-up alerts, then set email to check every 30 minutes instead of constantly. He recommends checking every 20-30 minutes for customer service roles or every 60-90 minutes for project work.
Chapters
Hi everybody, I'm Randy Dean, the Totally Obsessed Time and Technology Management Guy and author of the recent Amazon email bestseller, Taming the Email Beast. Today I'd like to share with you a quick little tip on how to adjust your Outlook settings so that you can reduce the distraction of constant, never-ending email. This was something that was prompted when I was recently speaking at one of my client sessions, and my client specifically asked, "Can you please show my people how to adjust their settings so that their email isn't always making noise and that they're not constantly receiving email all day long. And there's a couple quick tips that you can do inside of your Microsoft Outlook that will allow you to do that. So let's pop into Outlook here real quick, uh, and, um, to show you where I'm at, I'm actually going to close the Options tool here. And, uh, what I want to do is actually start out here so you can see how to do this. This is Obviously my Microsoft Outlook, and what I want to do now— this is Outlook 2010. If you happen to be using Outlook 2007 or earlier, write down this pathway: Tools, Options, Mail Options, and then sometimes you'll even have to click Advanced Options. So once again, that's Tools, Options, Mail Options, Advanced Options. But starting in Outlook 2010, they switched to this new File format up across the top, and so what I'm going to do is come up here and actually click in the upper left-hand corner of the File tab. That File tab gives me access to all of my Outlook options. So I'm going to click Options. And let me resize this a little bit so you can see this a little bit better. Alright, so we'll bring this down. There's my Options. And now what I'd like to do is actually go into my Mail options here. Clicking inside of Mail, not too far down the screen, you'll see I have Message Arrival. And look what I've done here. I've turned off both my sounds and my popups. They're not on, which means my email doesn't make noise when it comes in, nor does it pop pop up on my screen. That's one really simple way to reduce email distraction. If you find yourself getting caught by that bling noise and/or getting distracted by the pop-ups, that is a remarkably simple way to help take away some of that distraction. So that's one option. Here's a second option for you. Come into the Advanced tab under Options and page down to Send/Receive. Now, if I click in, you'll notice that whenever I hit Send, Send immediately goes out. But if I click this little button here, Send/Receive, Options, take a look at what this does. This allows me, if I'd like, to set up and schedule how often I want my email to go out to the email server and bring in new emails. Now, a lot of people have this set at things like 1 minute or 5 minutes. Notice that I put in 30 minutes, and I don't even have mine selected. So if I clicked on this right here, what that will do is now every 30 minutes, like clockwork, I— my email will go out and pull in the new messages that have come in. But what's interesting is I actually keep that turned off, and the reason I do that, now I have to manually go to the Send/Receive button inside of my Outlook and push the button to receive new emails. You see what I'm doing there? Basically, I'm only going to get new emails when I personally choose to go get them, thus keeping my email from being such a big distraction. And to really help with this, in my longer programs on how to better manage your email, what I basically teach is I'd rather you get yourself on a regimen. And when I say a regimen, how often do you need to check your email to be appropriately responsive to your clients, customers, coworkers, vendors, yet still give yourself some decent blocks of time to get focused work done? So that's the balance that you have to have between the two. One is getting your work done, the other one is getting back to people appropriately. And I'm a big believer that maybe you get yourself on a regimen. If you're in a high customer service position, maybe that regimen is every 20, 30 minutes you check your email. If you're in more of a project-oriented position, maybe you check your email every 60 to 90 minutes and then give yourself bigger blocks of time to get your work done. So with these simple two little tips, one, go to Mail and change your sound settings and your pop-up settings. The other one, go to Advanced and go inside of Send/Receive and schedule how often you're going to receive your email. And if you do those two things, as well as get yourself on a regimen, you're probably going to get yourself a very good chance to better manage your email while being less distracted by that email. Here's some places you can get some more info. You can find out more about my book out on Amazon. I also have a monthly e-newsletter where I share one tip a month to save time and one app a month that I think will help you with your smartphone/tablet productivity. Just send me an email, randy@randalldean.com. You'll see I'm available in some of these social places down below. And with that, I'd like to say we are done. Thank you all for your time, and I look forward to hopefully seeing you out on the road sometime.
