5 Outlook Email Tips to Improve Productivity
If you are like most accountants, email has become one of the primary tools utilized to communicate with clients, internal firm personnel and external resources on business matters. While there are a variety of email systems available, most of the major...
From the Sept. 2011 Issue.
If you are like most accountants, email has become one of the primary tools utilized to communicate with clients, internal firm personnel and external resources on business matters. While there are a variety of email systems available, most of the major accounting application vendors have integrated their products with Microsoft Office, which includes Outlook as their email client, making it the most prevalent tool we see utilized in accounting firms today. So it is important that firms become as proficient as possible with this tool. Below is an outline of five Outlook tips that have made us more effective in our practice.
1. Minimize Interruptions
The default for most email users is to notify the recipient whenever a new email arrives, which can include an audio signal as well as a visual queue. When this occurs, the user’s focus is pulled from what they are working on down to the toolbar where they must decide if that email must be responded to immediately, which, the vast majority of the time, is not necessary. During this brief interruption, focus is lost and the user must back track to where they were before the interruption and get back to work. These interruptions can be almost continuous, making it very difficult to effectively concentrate on the task at hand all the way through to completion. The solution to minimize these interruptions is to eliminate the visual and audio queues or to delay them for whatever time period the user feels is tolerable (usually 30 minutes or longer). To eliminate the notification within Outlook 2007, go to the Tools/Options/Preferences Tab > Email Options > Advanced Email Options, where you can “un-check” the boxes for what to do when new items arrive in your inbox. If you are waiting for a specific email to arrive or want to send an email immediately, you can hit the Send/Receive All button or F9. This process has allowed us to focus on projects through completion, and we now only Send/Receive emails on demand, as needed. To delay delivery, users can set the time they want by going to Outlook’s Send/Receive tab > Send/Receive Settings > Send/Receive Groups, where the default refresh time can be set for “All accounts.” If you work on larger projects, you can set the default to 60 minutes or longer.
2. Organize by Rules & Colors
A good percentage of the emails we receive can be grouped together to be addressed at a later time. By using Outlook Rules, they can be automatically routed to a specific folder so they can be accumulated until the user has time to access them. For example, many of us receive certain email newsletters or blogs that we want to read at our leisure but don’t want to be interrupted with as soon as they arrive. A “Reading” folder can be setup within Outlook 2007 under the New tab > Folder. When an email arrives that you want to have automatically routed to the Reading folder, Right-Click on that email and select “Create Rule” by checking the boxes that state whenever you receive an email from that sender it should be routed automatically to the folder you have selected. Whenever a new email is routed to a folder, it makes that folder appear in Bold so you know there are unread items. These settings can also be done in the Tools > Organize tab, where they also have a feature to change the color of inbound emails for specific senders. For example, all emails from a specific client or friends and family members are differentiated by a selected color so they stand out from other emails.
3. Reduce Email Volume More Effectively
We all know the amount of junk mail out there, and using hosted remailer services like Postini, AppRiver and McAfee/MxLogic or Spam filtering programs will clear out most offending spam emails before they hit your inbox. For those emails that clear the gauntlet but are still junk mail, you should right click on them and tag them as junk mail so they will be routed that way in the future. The other component of reducing volume is considering who to respond to and how. When an email is sent to a group of users but the response only has to go to one person, train your staff to respond only to that recipient instead of “Reply to All.” It’s also unnecessary to reply to everyone with acknowledgements like “me too” or “I agree,” unless there is a specific query (i.e., voting or survey).
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