My New Outlook Email Management Tips, 10 Day Give and Weekly Round Up

This week I spent three days in a corporate training environment learning about critical thinking.  I won’t break down the training for you (you can relax now), but I do want to share an organization tip that might just help simplify your work life.

One tool used in training was a problem solving technique.  Knowing well how many of us seem to be email challenged in terms of staying on top of all the emails either received personally or corporately, I decided to throw out the issue for our problem solving exercise.

Outlook email tips

Below are tips, if you’re an Microsoft Outlook user, that might just help you manage time more effectively.  Amongst many ideas, here are the three options we recommended to the class.  Forgive the simple nature if you’re an experienced Outlook user.  However, I’ve known about a few of these below for a while, but for whatever reason, I didn’t choose to implement them until now.  Thankfully, I did.

Set up folders for important categories

For example, I set up categories for departmental leadership and my customers.   Create rules to manage your inbox.  Outlook has a feature in which you can create specific rules based on sender, recipient, subject line and content key words that will automatically send emails to your category folders.   Create and run the rules that meet your needs.

Create an email time policy for yourself

Pick three times during the day (beginning, middle and end) in which you will review and respond to emails.  This is a biggy.  Most of us could spend the entire day on email, but we know this takes us away from the all important list of to do’s.

Leverage Outlook tasks

If you can’t respond to an email immediately it probably requires you to perform a task.  Use Outlook tasks to manage these tasks.  I drag emails to tasks and turn them into tasks for prioritization with other work.  Now, each day I can quickly review my task list, again by category, and pick out the top tasks in which I need to accomplish for the day.

After being out of the office the last 3 days for training, I had accomulated over 150 emails in my inbox.  Implementing my new process today, I now have a few unread emails in my category folders waiting for me to review.  I honestly couldn’t believe how efficient I became at managing emails today and successfully created more time to focus on my task list.

For the non Outlook users, I haven’t investigated yet, but you might be able to do something similar with Gmail or other popular email services.   What do you think about these ideas?  Let me know in the comments.

Round Up

To kick things off, I’m pleased to announce my article, Can Money By Happiness?, was included in The Carnival of Personal Finance #223 – National Dog Week hosted by My Life ROI.

Win the retirement race

According to Redeeming Riches, “the retirement race is a marathon – not a sprint.”  One of the tips, “define goals and review them regularly” was a nice reminder that I need to meet with my financial advisor this year.

I know there are a lot of people who choose to take retirement investing into their own hands and that is perfectly fine if you have the know – how.  For me, I prefer to work with a trusted advisor who can give me advice about investment options.

Depending on your life stage, I think it’s important to meet with your advisor at least once per year to review how your investments are distributed, performance and to build a relationship.  So, thanks to Redeeming Riches for the reminder and the 5 tips to winning the race.

Clean up 401k accounts

Along the retirement subject, I learned a good tip from The Digerati Life this week about doing some housekeeping for your 401k accounts from past employers.  If you’ve had several different jobs and associated 401k accounts in the past, think twice about leaving them open with those companies.  Given the current economic climate, you may want to get the investments to safe ground because you don’t know the long term future of companies today.  Rolling them over into an IRA under your control, or your financial advisor’s watch is a smart plan.

The 10 Day Give

Yahoo!  No, not Yahoo!, but YAHOO it’s the 10 Day Give kick off at Christian PF!  Bob is quite excited as many others who have signed up for this 10 day concious effort to give of your time, money or talents to those around you in need.   Why should you sign up?  Here’s what Bob says.

The purpose behind the 10 Day Give it is to give people an opportunity to:

Make the world a better place one gift at a time

Change the lives of those around you

Change your own life by better understanding the joy of giving

I can’t tell you how much I support this effort.  Giving has truly been a blessing in our lives and I know you will find it to be the same for you.  There is a real reward when you give of yourself to help another, so take the extra time each day to think about how you can help someone, if not monetarily, in just giving them a hand.  How do you sign up, Bob?  “It’s easy, and will take less than 10 seconds! Just go to the 10DG homepage to sign up!”

Great Ideas for Giving

Speaking of giving, are you trying to think about how you might give for 10 days in the 10 Day Give?  There are those who seem to have a real talent for brainstorming a list of great ideas.  Money Help for Christians is in the giving spirit this week by giving us a list of 101 giving ideas.  What’s your assignment after signing up?  Head on over and review the list of ideas and identify the ones that seem to resonate with you the most.   Here are a few that I liked.

Purchase an extra movie ticket and give it to someone just because.

Make a contribution to your local church.

Offer to buy a meal for a stranger.

Did you read other personal finance articles around the blogosphere this week you liked?  Share them with the One Money Design readers in the comments.

Image by popofatticus and Mzelle Biscotte.