Outlook rules for saving time

27 SEPTEMBER 11

RULING YOUR LIFE

Outlook Rules is a system of data filtering that allows you to customise what happens to your incoming and outgoing emails, appointments and tasks. It’s a tremendous time-saving tool for helping to prioritise your interactions. They can be quick to set up, and with a bit of fine-tuning, can make your inbox tidy, organised and easy to navigate.

Essentially, there are three parts to rules:

Conditions

What do you want to test against when sending/receiving messages? Some examples:

From/To specific people
Using specific words in the Subject/Header/Body
Has an Attachment added to it

Actions
What do you want to happen to the message after it has met the conditions? Some examples:

Move message to a specific Folder
Forward the message to other people or groups
Flag/Unflag the message

Exceptions

Are there any cases that you wouldn’t want the Action(s) chosen to occur? Some examples:

Except from specific people or groups
Except if assigned to a specific category
Except if marked as a particular Importance level

PLAYING BY THE RULES

Outlook has a “wizard” for creating rules that makes the whole process very easy.

If you’re using Outlook 2003, go to Tools > Rules and Alerts to open the dialogue box. If you’re in Outlook 2007/2010, go to the Ribbon, select the Home tab and there will be a Rules button, then select Manage Rules and Alerts. Once the Rules and Alerts box is open, select New Rule.

The next box that opens is the Rules Wizard. The Wizard gives you several commonly used templates that you can customise, or you can create your own Rule from scratch (down the bottom of the box). In this case, I’m starting a blank Rule to mark any messages that I receive as “Follow up Today”, except if they have been marked by the sender as “Low Importance”.

Once you have the dialogue box open, you’ll see that it has two sections. The upper section has Tick Boxes next to conditions. You can select as many as you like, but I only need one for my rule. The bottom section shows all of the conditions, actions and exceptions that you currently have on your Rule.

I’ve ticked the condition that needs to be met for the Rule to come into effect. It says “with specific words in the subject”. This has added the condition to my rule. Note that the term “specific words” is underlined and blue.
The reason that the term “specific words” is highlighted blue and underlined is because Outlook needs you to fill in what “specific words” you want to it to look for. Clicking on the highlighted words will bring up another box for you to enter these words into. In my case, I want Outlook to look for the word “Article”. So I entered it into the field, selected Add. Again, I could have entered multiple words here. Note: If you click the Next> button without filling in these highlighted blue, an error box will pop up, telling you that a “value was not set” for the condition, action or exception.

Once you’ve entered the value, and clicked OK, you’ll be able to see the item change from its original version to the entered value. When you’re happy with the selections that you’ve made, click Next to get to the Actions and repeat the process (tick the box of the Action that you want, click the blue underlined word of the Action that you’ve just selected, then enter in the value that you want to fill it out with). You can then do this again for the Exceptions to your rule, if you want to add any. The end result will read like a sentence. Double check that you’re happy with your new rule, then select Next>.

The final step is to give your Rule a name, which will help you to keep them organised and know what messages that they apply to. You can also tick the box that says “Run this rule now on messages already in X”, where X is the folder that you currently have active in Outlook (which in my case is the Inbox). This will run the Rule on the folder, where usually it would only run on incoming or outgoing messages. By default, the rule will be on, but unchecking the “Turn on this rule” box will stop this. Click Finish when you’re happy with the Rule, and you’re done!

DON'T LET THE MAJORITY RULE!

If you’re just starting out with Rules, don’t make too many at once, as it’s easy to get confused with what you’re doing (and where your messages are going!). Think about what’s going to be best for how you run your day to day business by letting Outlook do the work that you would normally do manually.

Do you use Categories? Run a rule on the people/businesses that you have Categories for. Do you like messages organised into Folders? Have your messages sent to their respective folders. Do you need to forward a suppliers emails onto your team? Make a rule to do it for you!

Rules are a great tool for increasing your productivity and organising your mail and messages. See what’ll work for you!