In this live presentation, productivity consultant Randy Dean (author of Taming the Email Beast) demonstrates practical, technology‑driven methods for managing email, tasks, and calendar time. He opens with a brief personal credibility statement and engages the audience with humor and interactive questions about daily task lists and workload stress. Dean then shows step‑by‑step how to drag‑and‑drop an email in Microsoft Outlook to create a task, add details, and convert the same email into a calendar appointment, highlighting the ability to invite attendees directly from the created event. He contrasts Outlook’s native drag‑and‑drop with Gmail, walking the audience through Google Workspace shortcuts that open Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Drive in separate tabs, effectively replicating Outlook’s integrated view. Dean introduces the concept of “blinging” – the habit of checking email as soon as a notification sounds – and cites media‑reported research linking constant email checking to significant IQ loss and reduced productivity. He proposes the “3‑minute rule”: if a message can be handled in three minutes, do it; otherwise, turn it into a task, then file or delete. Dean illustrates delegation using Outlook’s task‑assignment feature (the “dog‑bath” example) and explains how acceptance or decline is tracked. Throughout, he promotes his suite of training programs (e.g., Optimizing Outlook, Google Cloud Productivity, Smartphone Success) and shares a client result that employees saved two or more hours per week by applying his strategies. The talk concludes with a call‑to‑action for booking his sessions.
Chapters
Hello everyone, I'm Randy Dean, popularly known as the Totally Obsessed Time and Tech Management Guy and author of the recent Amazon email bestseller, Taming the Email Beast. For the past 25 years, I've been leading and teaching programs on how to marry traditional, proven time and productivity management strategies with the most popular current technology and software. For the last 10+ years, I've been doing this in private practice, Speaking at some of the biggest conferences, corporations, universities, governmental entities, and associations, leading packed programs on truly valuable, immediately usable content directly related to workplace productivity. Like most good speakers, I of course have fun with my audience.
By the way, how many of you make some form of a daily task list? It doesn't have to be in your Outlook. Wow, almost everybody. Did you know that that's step 1 for being diagnosed Type A? That's step 1. It's not the full test. Here's the full test, all of you daily task list people. Have any of you that do your little daily task list ever done something not on your task list and then you wrote it down just so you could check it off? That's Type A. Okay, so you've been diagnosed. All right. So—
and I share valuable, immediately usable content.
How many of you have too much to do in your job? Darn near everybody in the room. Of course you do. In this economy, you're stretched. How many of you get a little bit stressed by the fact that you have too much to do in your job? Once again, darn near everybody. And a few people just sitting giggling, right? Can I give you a fundamental life and career reframe right in this moment? Having too much to do in your job is exactly where you want to be, right? Because if you have too much to do and you are reasonably competent at what you do, meaning you're pretty good at it, what two words does that equate to? Job security. Or as someone so eloquently said in one of my sessions a few weeks ago, paycheck. I said, I don't think that's two words, but I like it. Right? All right. Yeah. See, if you're pretty good at what you do and you got too much to do, they're not gonna get rid of you unless they absolutely have to, right? You know when I get nervous? When I don't have enough to do.
But here's where I'm a bit different. I actually open up and do live demos in market-leading software like Microsoft Outlook, Google Productivity Suite. And so what Carol's asking for is just a quick little calendar snapshot of what my schedule is going to look like moving forward. It's gonna take me a couple minutes to do this, so I'm gonna take this email, I'm gonna left-click on the email and hold that click, and now drag the email down to the task icon and drop it. And as you can see, what that does in Microsoft Outlook is it allows you to convert an email in a matter of just a couple seconds into a new task item. Now, of course, I need to add a little bit more context here so that I know exactly what this task is. Get— we're down here in the wrong area. Let's go back up here. Get Carol update on calendar snapshot. Due date early next week. Priority high. Category clients prospects. And Voilà. What I can do now is I can do a couple other things. I can actually take this email here from Carol, and I can quickly drag and drop it to Calendar. And by doing this, this will allow me to very quickly— let's try that again. Drag and drop to Calendar, and you'll see that what it does is it will very quickly allow me to create a calendar appointment in my calendar. And so what I'm going to actually do is block some time on my calendar. "Get Carol update on calendar." Location, home office. And time, ah, let's do that next Wednesday at 10:30 AM. And notice this, something sort of interesting. If I would like, by now that I have this on here, I could even come up and click Invite Attendees to invite other people to this meeting that I just created from this email.
So you can use that drag and drop in Outlook not just for creating tasks, but you can use it for creating contacts very quickly and efficiently, and for creating calendar items. And it's a two-way street. You can take something from your task list and drag it over to Mail and turn it into an email. Or a calendar item and drag it to Mail and turn it into an email. So those of you that are not utilizing that, I strongly recommend it because that is one of the huge time savers. It's probably one of the key features that I really like in Outlook versus some of the other programs that are out there.
Now, unfortunately, that really cool little drag-and-drop thing in Microsoft Outlook does not work in Gmail. But did you know you can actually take an email in Gmail, click on it to open it up, and use the "More" button up here in order to add that item to Google Tasks or possibly create a new event in the Google Calendar. And if you'd like, you can even put your mouse just over the sender's name, and that will give you the opportunity to add them to your contact list, just like Microsoft Outlook. You can see I'm in my Chrome browser and I'm in my open Gmail account. And if you now use this cool little tool, Shortcuts for Google, which we've already talked about you can actually do something pretty amazing with your Google Suite. Watch this real close. So I'll click this and open this up, which will allow me to then open Calendar in the second tab, open my Google Contacts in a third tab, open up my Google Tasks in a fourth tab, and in my final tab, I'll open up my Google Drive where my Google Docs are stored. And so as you can see, very quickly I have my inbox my Google Calendar, my Google Contacts, my Google Tasks, and my Google Docs where my notes are all open on one screen, thus making my Google Suite just like Microsoft Outlook— email, calendar, contacts, tasks, and notes. People walk out knowing how to change their work through the software they use every day. I also have popular programs and topics like my most popular program Taming the Email Beast.
How many of you are checking your email in real time? When one pops in, you're looking at it?
All right.
Statistics show that about 20 to 25% of professional email users are checking their email 20 or more times per day, right? I call this behavior blinging. Blinging? What's blinging? It has absolutely nothing to do with modern contemporary hip-hop culture. Let me tell you what it is. It's that little sound that your Outlook makes or your email server makes when a new message comes in. And for some people, it's like Pavlovian, right? They hear that little bubbling and they'll be working on something. Bubbling.
Haha!
What's going on? Where was I? What? Every time you do it, a little micro-interruption, you forget where you're at. Where was I? What was I doing? Oh yeah, back to work. Bubbling. Haha! Like a crack addict going for their fix. They can't stop themselves. Don't listen to me, listen to what the scientists said. I pulled this off of the scientific bastion Yoga Journal, but it was also covered by CNN and ABC News last year. Scientists believe that incessantly checking email can lead to significant IQ loss, making workers less efficient. A recent study from the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London suggests that your IQ falls 10 points when you're fielding constant emails, text messages, and phone calls. My apologies to all of you that that is your job description, by the way. To put that in perspective, that's roughly the same loss you'd experience if you missed an entire night's sleep, and more than double the 4-point loss you'd have after smoking marijuana. You can't make this stuff up. Constantly checking your email makes you twice as dumb as a pot smoker. No offense. No offense to any of the pot smokers in the room today. Now, of course, I'm not going to endorse or embrace the illicit use of illegal drugs, but I do want to impress upon you how damaging this behavior can be. If you're constantly checking emails and taking phone calls and dealing with IM all day long, you're basically in this state of hyper-confusion most of the day, meaning you can't focus, meaning you can't get much anything done. Any of you ever felt like that, where you sit in the office and go, "Man, I just—" I just can't get my thoughts together today. Anybody ever have one of those days? My first question to you is how many times have you checked your email, your voicemail, and your texts? Then you do the 3-minute rule we talked about. 3 minutes or less, get it done. Longer than 3 minutes, task it. Once done or tasked, file or delete. No place to file, make. Do that with every single one every time you do this regimen. That's how you keep that thing down close to zero by checking it several times a day and working it down. Have any of you ever been so clever that you figured out how to put the entire text of your message in the subject line? You ever pull that one off? Meeting will be at this place at this time on this date. Agenda tomorrow. EOM. EOM. End of message. Yeah, see, they don't even need to open it. First time you use it, put it in parentheses so they know what it means, right? How about this one? You ever send them, you know, somebody says, "Hey, can you please send me that document I need?" So you send them the document, and then they say, "Hey, here's that document you asked for. Please confirm receipt." "Yeah, got it, thanks." "No, thank you." "No, thank you." "No, thank you." NRN, no reply necessary.
And my finding an extra hour every day program.
Those of you that attended my email class probably think that the first thing I check in the morning is my email. Nope. First thing I check in the morning is my calendar. And what I'm doing when I go into my calendar is I'm looking not just today, but a few days in advance. My first question is, is there anything on this calendar that I need to get as a task on my task list? Something that I need to get done for these calendar events. Second question I'm asking myself looking at my calendar is, how much time is specifically blocked today for preexisting events, meetings, client commitments, whatever they are. Let's say I got 4 hours blocked, but I have 4 hours that are open. I'm gonna come back and look at this task list and say, "Well, I got 4 hours that are open for getting stuff done." You know what? I can't get all this done in just a 4-hour block. So I want everybody to watch this very closely. Watch this very closely. Are you ready? Who just saw me procrastinate? See it? Wanna see it again? Alright, you missed it. Watch this, this is procrastination. Alright, yeah, Steve, I'll call you tomorrow, bud. There we go. Procrastination 101. Did you see it? We've got about a 75-pound black lab mix. It's summertime. It's been a couple weeks since her last bath. She's starting to get a little stinky, right? I'd like to delegate this task to my beautiful wife, Jana. What you think? How many of you guys think I'm gonna pull that one off? Dog bath to the wife. Who thinks I'm gonna pull that one off? Now notice how beautifully I've constructed this though. Dog needs a bath. Jana, the person I wanna outsource it to, 8/12. That's the day I hope she can get it done by. What's 8/10? What's 8/10? That's the date I got a bugger, right? And if I was completely and totally off my rocker, I would pick up my cell phone right now and call my wife asking her to wash the dog. If I was even more insane, I would do this. Check out this handy little button up here, assign task. Now watch what happens when I hit this thing. Cool, it's an email. Awesome. I can just type in here, Dean Janna. Oh, it didn't take it. Let's try that again. Dean Janna. There we are. And if I was completely and totally nuts, I'd hit the send button right now. I was in a session about a week ago, guys going, "Do it, do it." I'm not that crazy. You want to know why that's really crazy? That thing is going to blow out as an email and guess what the title of that email is, all it says, "Dog needs a bath, Jana, 8:12." Guess who's sleeping with the dog tonight if I do that number, right? Now, this is a handy little tool though. This is a handy little tool. If you've got other people that are using Outlook, they will get this invitation via email when you hit send. And at the top, it will have two buttons, accept, decline. I know which one my wife will hit. But assuming she declines it, I'll get a bounce back saying they didn't accept the task. If she hits accept, it populates her task list and I get a tracking version of it in my task list. And when it gets marked complete, I'll be able to see that it was mark complete.
As well as programs on Optimizing Your Outlook, Time and Productivity Management in the Cloud Using Google, Smartphone Success and Terrific Tablets, Getting More Done in an Interrupted World, and Ending the Office Clutter: Managing Stacks, Piles, and Info Overload. One of the nice things about my program list that you can see now is that I can often stretch the dollar of meeting planners and organizational training managers by doing multiple topics and/or programs at a single event. And I have an amazing repeat business rate. People love my programs and clients love my program ratings and results. One client found that their employees that attended my programs were saving 2 hours or more per week per employee simply by using my strategies. I thank you for the time you took today to take a brief look at me. You can use the contact information below for more information on bringing me to your next program, conference, meeting, or event.
