In this instructional video, email productivity expert Randy Dean explains how to curb the constant interruptions caused by email by configuring built‑in features of Microsoft Outlook and Google Gmail. He begins by citing statistics that the average user checks email 15‑20 times per day, that excessive checking can lower IQ, and that 82 % of global email traffic is spam, establishing the problem of email distraction. Dean then walks through step‑by‑step setups in Outlook: creating rules that trigger custom sounds or pop‑up alerts for messages from specific senders, subjects, or marked as high importance, and customizing the sound files to differentiate critical emails. He follows with a parallel walkthrough for Gmail: using Filters and Blocked Addresses to automatically mark messages from chosen contacts as important, then enabling desktop notifications only for those important messages. Dean also discusses higher‑level strategies such as turning off all notifications and adopting a batch‑checking schedule (e.g., every 30‑90 minutes) to prevent constant context switching. He concludes by encouraging viewers to apply these settings, visit his website for deeper training, and subscribe for more tips.
Chapters
Alright, hello everyone. Welcome to today's video tip. What I'd like to talk to you today about is how you can actually use the settings within both your Outlook and Gmail to potentially reduce your email distraction. And once again, my name is Randy Dean, popularly known as the Email Sanity Expert. I'm the author of the recent Amazon email bestseller, Taming the Email Beast. And this is a pretty important little topic. It's something that comes up very frequently when I do my live programs for different audiences at different conference events, workshops, and company trainings around the United States and Canada because of how distracting email inherently is, and the statistics support it. Email can be super distracting. Listen to this statistic: the average user that manages their email is looking at their email 15 times per day, with about one-quarter of email users checking their email 20 or more times per day, which means if you do the math on that, they're checking their email every few minutes. And then they wonder why they're so distracted. What happens is they're checking their email too often, and there's another study that recently came out that says that if you are checking email too frequently, it can actually negatively affect your IQ. It can literally make you somewhat stupid. And when you add to that the 82% of all emails now sent globally are junk or spam, you can see how this can really get out of hand. But here's the counter side to that. Some emails really do matter. You really do want to see certain important and/or urgent emails fairly quickly. And you might also agree with the fact that some email senders matter more than others. You'd really like to know when a certain person sends you an email so you can respond to those emails more quickly too. And because of this, a lot of people get into what I call an email trap. They have to check every single email coming in to see if it's an email that's from— that's either from one of their most important people or is important or urgent in its own nature. And thus they're checking all of their emails, both most important and least important emails, all together, all at the same time, all right now, making themselves stupid, making themselves distracted, making it hard for them to get their work done. So what do you do here? Well, here's the thing. Both Outlook and Gmail can help you manage your distraction better. And let me show you how. First thing, what I want to do is go into my Microsoft Outlook. Let's pop into my Outlook and go into my inbox. And you'll notice that inside of my inbox here, I actually have this email from me to me. And let's say I wanted to see whenever I sent myself an email, because frankly, that's a bit of a weird thing to do. I can right-click on this email from me, come down here to Rules, and then it gives me the option to create a rule. And then when I create this rule, I can basically set up these conditions. If it's from me, or if it contains a certain thing in the subject line, look what it allows me to do. I can either have a pop-up come on my screen or I can play a special sound. Now you'll notice right now the sound that's installed is that Windows notify. That's the standard bubbling sound that you've been hearing for years that makes you look. But what you can do is you— a lot of people don't realize this— these are little .wav files and you could actually create your own with a little recorder or install one of your own from the internet that is a different sound. So I can install a different sound for my most important senders, maybe something like instead of bubbling. So when I hear a bubbling sound, I might not look, but if I hear that dun-da-dun-da, I might look more quickly. Now what's interesting is, look at this, you can even go under advanced options and not just base it off the sender's name or the email or certain words in the message. You can even come in here and do it whether it's marked important or not. And under importance, you'll actually have to click the importance option and select. And notice, so this way I can basically set it up so only emails that are marked high importance are the ones that I set up the special sounder for. So all of these are potential options that might actually help you reduce the distraction of your email by identifying your most important emails and/or most important senders and having those set up so they give you a pop-up and/or a special notifier on your screen. So that's what I recommend in Outlook. But now let's go take a look at Gmail. We can pop into Gmail, and here's what you do inside of Gmail. Go up to your Settings option. Come down, actually, and click on the Word Settings. And inside of Gmail, what you'll have to do is what I call a little two-step. First thing is go to Filters and Blocked Addresses. And what you can do inside of here is create a filter for a specific type of sender. So let's say I want to have a filter for Randy Dean. And thus, here's the thing: whenever an email comes from Randy Dean, create filter with this search. Look what I can do. I can come in here and mark it, always mark it as important. So if I hit create filter, now whenever an email from Randall F. Dean comes in, they will all be marked important. So that's step 1, but now here's step 2. Once you do this, go back into settings, click on settings, and from the general tab, you can page down just a little ways and take a look at this desktop notifications. And look what I've done. I've turned important mail notifications on. So you see what I've done there. Any email from Randy Dean is going to be marked important, and I'm going to get a notification only when it's an important message. So thus, I'll always know when an email from Randy Dean comes in, as well as any other emails from other senders that are marked important also. But now let's talk about this from a little bit higher level. Let's say you're not really getting any emails that are so critically important you have to look right now, and/or you've had conversations with your most important people and encouraged them with that whenever they send you something red-hot urgent. Maybe they pick up the phone or come stop by too, so you don't have to be a slave to your email inbox. Ideas there. If that's the case, you could turn these notifications off. Look at this, in Gmail you can turn your mail notifications off. And take a look at this, going back into Outlook, go up to the File tab, down to Options, and under Mail Options. So that was File tab, Options, Mail Options. Look at this. Message arrival. I've set my Outlook up so it doesn't play sounds or have pop-ups. Still allow that little envelope in the taskbar, but I can even turn that off if that was becoming too much of a distraction. So this basically means that instead of being constantly distracted by everything new coming in, instead I am checking my email on a regimen. And I encourage a lot of people to consider doing that option too. Instead of checking email nonstop, never-endingly, all the time, potentially consider whether you might want to just check your email every half hour, 45 minutes, 60 minutes, 90 minutes, whatever it will take for you to be appropriately responsive to your clients, customers, coworkers, while simultaneously not getting so distracted that you can't get any work done. So in essence, give yourself some little blocks of time to keep your focus and get some things done. So as you can see, both tools allow you to manage this distraction. So let's finish this thing up. First thing I want to do is just thank you for your time. I do hope that you got a couple ideas here on how you can maybe adjust your settings and/or set up the special rules or notifiers in both Outlook or Gmail to potentially reduce distraction while still giving high-level customer service to your most important emails and most urgent emails. To learn a little bit more about my programs— this is just a little part of what I teach in a lot of my programs— if you'd like to learn more about the different programs that I lead, come out and check out some of my information on my website, randalldean.com. If you want to get more of these tips as I create them, I usually create a video tip every month or two, just subscribe to my YouTube channel. Thank you for your time.
