Working Smarter with Microsoft Outlook

Chapter 14: Nine Useful Rules

Research shows that we spend 20–30% of our work week managing our emails. This means that in a 40 hour-a-week job, 12 hours will be spent reading and answering emails. This number does not include other emails you may be processing at home and other activities you are involved in.

To work more efficiently, we need to get our emails in order, and using rules as discussed in Chapter 4, Organizing Your Outlook Environment, is one way to do this. You can refer to the rules and alerts section in Chapter 4, before continuing with this chapter for a refresher on creating rules. This chapter is going to give you some useful suggestions to create rules for organizing your emails and work.

Let's look at some of the rules ...