Office At Work : email

Add train journey details to Outlook appointments

StephB — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:53:00 GMT

I recently heard about an extremely useful add-in for Outlook 2007 from National Rail Enquiries, which allows you to plan and add train journey details to your Outlook appointments. Great idea and it’s really nicely put together too :). The screenshots below show how it works in Outlook 2007, but there’s also a version for Outlook 2003.

First of all you just download the plug-in from the National Rail Enquiries web site.

Once you’ve installed the plug-in you get an extra ‘Journey Planner’ button in all your appointments.

Clicking the Journey Planner button opens a dialogue box where you can specify you’re departure and arrival destinations, including default settings for work and home. You can then view details to select the journey which best suit your needs.

Once you’ve selected your journey appointments are created in your Outlook calendar which even have reminders set to the appropriate time, so you leave enough time to make it to the station!

The appt itself has all the detail of your journey, including links to the live departure board, so you track any delays. You can also set up SMS alerts for the journey.

All in all, a really nicely designed little application, which I know I’ll be making good use of very soon. Give it a go and let me know if it works for you!

Download the National Rail Enquiries plug-in for Outlook 2003 or Outlook 2007

Stop doing email

GillLeFevre — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 15:36:33 GMT

One of my interests/challenges/obsessions at work is personal productivity. How can you get everything you need to do done and still get home at a reasonable hour? Can you get a work/home balance that doesn’t require regular sacrifices -- on either side? And what’s the secret to defeating Parkinson’s Law?

With these ongoing questions at the back of my mind, I was struck when I came across a series of articles by a colleague, Dave Wascha, that outlined practical steps to master your workload and maximise your effectiveness – without turning you into a jobsworth. Over to Dave…

Stop doing email

Every time I hear someone talk about how much email they got through yesterday, or how many emails they have in their inbox it drives me absolutely crazy. How many times a day do you hear others talk about how much email they do? How often do you talk about how much you do? We don’t pay people to do email; we pay people to drive business impact. One of the most common patterns I’ve observed in my time working is that people too often confuse the two. People confuse activity with driving business impact.

There are two common activities that we often confuse with impact: doing mail, and going to meetings.

Email is not progress

One pitfall I’ve fallen into and witnessed again and again with others is when we aren’t clear on our goals or how we add value, when we’re not feeling empowered or motivated, or when we simply don’t know what to do next, then email is something tangible we can do to delude ourselves that we’re making progress. It’s very alluring. You can (and probably do) spend hours processing hundreds of emails, deleting, filing, responding, watching your inbox shrink, reacting to new mails coming in etc. and when you’re done you can say, “Wow, I got through 800 mails!” It feels like you’ve accomplished something.

But even if we’re focused and clear about our objectives, we are haunted by our inboxes. We open up the inbox in the morning, see that we already have 40 new emails and it’s only 7:30am and we look at our calendars and see that we have meetings all day and there’s no way we’re going to get through it all and we feel overwhelmed by it. As good conscientious employees we feel compelled to read and respond to every single email we get. We must let go of this notion. Doing mail can be largely a waste of time. I know because I stopped doing mail six years ago. Well…mostly.

In 2003 I found myself spending more and more time doing mail and yet as hard as I tried I was never able to keep up. Inevitably I’d have to work on two or three Saturdays a month and spend the day “catching up on mail” and cleaning out my inbox. I found this unwinnable battle very demoralizing. I got around 12,000 emails in 2003. If you assume an average of 2 minutes (which is probably low) reading and/or responding to all 12,000 of these mails it roughly equates to spending 9-10 hours a week doing mail. I was spending all this time doing mail and yet I was getting further behind in what I was actually supposed to be doing against my objectives. I felt caught in this ever increasing loop of mail, mail and more mail and it wasn’t helping me actually get my job done.

The black list

On one of those Saturdays as I was sitting at my desk catching up on mail I decided to conduct an experiment. I set out to discover just how little mail I could read and respond to and still achieve my objectives and drive the business forward. I started by deciding that I wouldn’t read any mail from certain people who tended to send me a lot of mail that wasn’t relevant to my job, or my objectives. I made a list of those people and built rules in Outlook to delete mail from them automatically (I maintain such a list today). People are always shocked when I tell them I do this. This reduced my incoming mail rate by about 5-10%. I was encouraged. I was buying back time through deleting irrelevant mail without reading it. I then took a pretty big leap and stole a rule from a colleague which was to delete all mails where I was on the CC line without reading them. This one made me nervous because I thought surely I was going to miss out on lots of important information and be out of the loop on crucial goings on. My incoming mail rate immediately dropped by another 40%. When I tell people this they immediately ask, “How long did that last before things started to get dropped?” But interestingly enough little if anything got dropped. Most people are terrible about how much thought they put into who goes on the CC line. In fact they tend to err on the side of sending mail more broadly than necessary. If the only exposure you have to some idea or piece of information is through being copied on a mail about it, how crucial can it really be to doing your job? Anyway, through these two simple steps I reduced my incoming mail rate by half and it was having no negative impact on my ability to do my job. In fact was spending less time on mail, hours less, and I was increasing the time I had to spend on driving the business forward.

I started to get addicted to deleting mail. Through trial and error I continued to build rules in Outlook to whittle and pair and trim mail that wasn’t directly relevant to me driving business impact. Anything that wasn’t directly relevant to the daily execution of my job got deleted or moved to a folder before I read it.

It’s good to talk

I continued to scan and analyze my inbox for patterns or trends that would allow me to cut even more. I began to notice that a significant portion of the mail in my inbox at that point were responses to mails that I’d sent other people. Furthermore I also noticed that the more people I put on the TO: line and the CC: line the more responses I got back. This of course seems obvious, but it led me to experiment with further refinements to my system. I made a list of the people I most often sent mail to. For six years I’ve made this list in every role I’ve had and it has always been the case that I send the bulk of my mail to 5 or 6 people. I then made sure that I have frequent, short meetings with those people, and I started to choose the phone as the primary communications channel in the absence of an in-person meeting. One 3 minute phone call or ten minute meeting often saved a thread of dozens of back and forth emails and hours spent conversing in mail. So, in addition to cutting back on the amount of mail I received, I also started to cut back on the amount of mail I sent. I sent fewer mails and I sent them to fewer people.

When you go through this refinement process you’re left with a handful of mails from the 5-7 most crucial people for you to be in touch with on the 3-4 things that are most important to your job. In fact, those 3-4 things should map directly to your objectives. If they don’t your system is flawed.

In all but a few circumstances email is not the best way to communicate with people. Additionally I believe most of the email we get is not directly relevant to doing our jobs. Email is a tool to get a job done and yet for many of us it has become our job. I got over twenty thousand emails last year and I deleted nearly 70% of them without reading them. Of those I did read I responded to fewer than half. If you spend a ridiculous amount of time doing email you are likely doing it at the expense of driving business impact and your own work/life balance. I’m ruthless about deleting mail and I don’t apologize for it. Only very, very rarely do I actually miss something that was pretty important.

Don’t confuse reading or writing email with driving business impact. I don’t get paid to do mail and neither do you.

Key Takeaways:

Don’t confuse activity like doing email with making progress on driving the business forward
Most of the email you get is not crucial to doing your job
Create a system for identifying irrelevant (or less relevant) mail and delete as much as possible without reading it
Send less mail and send it to fewer people
Choose the phone, instant messenger or short, in-person meetings instead of email whenever possible
Use the time you save doing steps 1-5 to make focused progress on driving the business forward

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) now available to download

StephB — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 21:15:07 GMT

If you’re using Office 2007 and want to keep your computer completely secure and performing at it’s best - and I know you do - head to the links below, where you can find out about and download Service Pack 2 (SP2). If you have your PC configured to download updates automatically (Control Panel / System & Security / Windows Update), you will get this update automatically after around 90 days. However you can get the benefits straight away by installing the update early from Windows Update on your PC or by following the links below.

What are the improvements?

Faster email management in Outlook 2007

According to expert & blogger Gray Knowlton ‘One of the most important end user benefits of the SP2 release is the improvement in Outlook performance.’. Amen to that I say – anything that speeds up managing my email is a definite plus :). Improvements include:

Faster and more predictable startup & shutdown
Better folder view & switching
Improved calendar reliability
Reduction in number of data file check error messages

‘Save as PDF and XPS’ added to ‘Save As’ options

If you haven’t already downloaded this feature you’ll find it installed as part of the SP2 update. Saving as PDF or XPS keeps your formatting intact and secure so you can ensure your documents are seen exactly as you intended. So, very handy if you have official docs to email or complex creations to send to the printer.

Save as ODF 1.1

This feature should help if you have friends or colleagues using other types of office software. Basically, it allows you to save your Office 2007 docs in a shareable format which is easily read by most types of office software.

Next steps

· Where can I download SP2? – You can pop up to Microsoft Update and install the bits

· Where can I learn about what is in SP2? – Here

· Is this an Automatic Update? – Not yet. For the first 90 days (at least the first 90), service packs are made available as a manual download. After 90 days and with a 30 day notice, Service Packs are offered through the Automatic Update channel as a critical update.

Want even more info

More detailed overview of the Office 2007 Service Pack 2 can be found on Gray Knowlton’s Gray Matter blog – from which most of this info in lovingly cribbed. Thanks Gary!

True... my sister-in-law's colleague said this happened to her son's next door neighbour...

GillLeFevre — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 15:04:00 GMT

A timely reminder of the dangers of online crime from my colleague and Microsoft UK's Chief Cyber Security Advisor, Ed Gibson:

A few days ago the news broke that a series of banks, savvy investors and other esteemed financial institutions had collectively become victims of a $50b fraud. Inevitably, this news was quickly followed by shock and outrage: "how could this happen?" "where were the regulators?" "how could reputable companies and individuals have been suckered?"

But how surprised should we really be? White-collar criminals are the best in the league. Having investigated scores of massive complex fraud schemes during my career as an FBI Agent, I know never to underestimate the apparent plausibility of the schemes invented -- or the willingness of victims to clutch at the "hope" offered by scammers and to fall for a deal too good to be true.

So here's a reminder of my list of things for you to stay away from online no matter how good or believable they might appear to be...

1. Banks will NEVER ask you to verify your account details – they already have your details. The same applies to Ebay and PayPal.

2. MySpace, Bebo, Facebook, and ALL other social network sites are OPEN by default. Unless you want everyone (including that bully at school, the nosey neighbour, your boss, your mother, or the paedophile from abroad) looking at your site, NEVER use it until you make it PRIVATE. Go into the website settings and follow the instructions. See www.safesocialnetworking.com for more information. The same applies to Instant Messenger -- if you don’t know the person, don’t add them as a contact.

3. Microsoft has not and NEVER will hold a Lottery. (And when we do hold competitions, the terms and conditions will be posted on our website so you can check.)

4. You know if you have relatives in Nigeria or West Africa. NEVER ‘help’ someone you don’t know move money from a foreign country -- that makes you a criminal too!

5. NEVER click a hyperlink in an email from someone you don’t know. And be wise, unless you know who is sending you the online Birthday or Christmas card NEVER click on it – it’s loaded with malware or will redirect you to someplace you don’t want to be. Miscreants and criminals frequently abuse the ‘Hallmark’ name because it is so recognizable. If your name is not in the body of the email, do not click on it.

6. Wireless Internet: Make sure your wireless internet is secure (WEP is okay, WPA is better – and if you don’t know what these terms mean, read the instructions that came with your wireless device). If you're not sure how to secure your network, do NOT use your wireless internet until you find a trusted advisor to fix it (generally your neighbour’s 14 year old kid).

7. There is no free lunch. NEVER reply to email requests for charitable contributions. If you want to donate to a good cause, call the charity yourself and know who you are talking to.

8. "Free" deals usually have a sting in the tail. NEVER reply to pop up ads telling you to run free anti-spyware or anti-malware to get rid of spyware or viruses. You can be certain they will ‘find’ bad stuff on your computer requiring you to buy what they want to sell. OR they will load stealth software onto your computer to steal what’s important to you.

9. NEVER think you are smarter than the criminal. You may be, but if you reply, you lose, you will always lose.

10. Falling in love at first sight does happen – and it’s fabulous when it does – but falling in love online, whether in Second Life or another online virtual world, can be dangerous. Hey, if you are scoring a 4 or 5 in real life, you gotta wonder why a 9 or 10 is chatting you up online...

Finally, think before you forward an email -- whether it's promising good news ("free Marks & Spencer vouchers") or warning of dire dangers ("an armed and dangerous man hiding in your backseat"). There are several internet websites, including snopes.com and hoax-slayer.com, that enable you to check whether or not the offer or warning you've just received are genuine.

(Probably) the most useful Office tip ever

GillLeFevre — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 14:57:24 GMT

With a computer, correcting your work is completely taken for granted. For example, I've rewritten this paragraph about six times which, twenty years ago, would have required at least two pieces of paper and lots of crossing out (I still remember my Dad's first electronic typewriter which would let you correct the last 15 characters typed -- and at the time we were so impressed!). But the one thing that is still difficult to "undo" is sending an email. (Our friends at VideoJug.com have demonstrated just how hazardous this mistake can be!)

I probably need to "undo" an email two or three times a week, and it's almost always because I've forgotten to actually attach the attachment that I said I was sending... Even more frustrating, I usually remember that I've forgotten about 5 seconds after I've sent the email and I'm forced to send the embarrassing follow-up email: "Ah, yes, attachment actually attached this time...sorry".

A colleague took pity on me and pointed out this tip: set up a rule in Microsoft Outlook to delay sending all your emails for two minutes.

Office Online has all the details on how to set this up: http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/outlook/HP012328171033.aspx?pid=CH100776981033#2

It took me five minutes to get it sorted and then every time I have an "oh no, stop that email" moment, I just go into my outbox and open up the email in question. Once the email's open, it won't be sent until I click "send" again, so I can take as long as I need to correct it.

The other alternative is to recall your message after it's been sent, but there are a number of limitations with this: both you and the recipients need to be accessing your email from an exchange server; and -- more importantly -- the email needs to still be unread. Better safe than sorry, so get that rule set up today.

Surviving work travel with Microsoft Office

GillLeFevre — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 14:02:08 GMT

I've just spent a week out of the office on a work conference. It's the first time I've been away from my daughter for more than a night since she was born and, as chief child-minder in our household, an enormous amount of advance planning was required to make sure everything ran smoothly while I was away.

The contrast with the effort (not) required to keep my "day job" under control was vast, so I thought I'd share a few thoughts about the technology I used to survive.

1. RPC over HTTP (or failing that Outlook Web Access)

Basically this string of acronyms means I can get email through any internet connection. It's a godsend. No need to dial into a company server, just connect and go. And the number of places world-wide where you can get wireless internet access is incredible (even our local pub is offering Wifi!) so no more excuses for not sending that overdue email...

2. Groove

Groove synchronises files without you having to think. It's a great way to work on documents with other people and not have to email countless versions back and forth (and always end up with someone working on an out-of-date copy). For me on this trip it meant that I had the latest copy of our newsletter with me when we ran into a last-minute problem.I just opened up the Groove Workspace, fixed the problem and saved the document. Then when my colleague got into the office the next morning, it was all ready to go.

If you haven't discovered Groove yet, download a free trial.

3. Office Communicator

"Presence" is a wonderful thing. It's the little icon in Office Communicator that tells you when people are online (or busy, or in a call...). It means that although I'm in another time zone, my colleagues in the UK can easily see when I'm up and online. Then they can fire off a quick question (or just say hello) and get a quick answer, without having to clog up my inbox. Of course, it also means I can see which of my colleagues are having just as much trouble with jetlag as me...

And I haven't even touched on "Out of Office"...

How I survive an overflowing inbox.......Frank Sinatra Style...!

ElisaS — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 23:18:00 GMT

We're all too familiar with emails.....(sometimes too many of them)....flooding into our inbox day in and day out. For many of us, our lives and jobs revolve around our inbox. We can often spend days just trawling through and answering those emails without actually ever getting to do your "day job".

For me, I have to take control back over my inbox.....I don't let it control me. I have to do this to stay sane....and here's how I do it.....

Firstly, I block out 3 small slots in my diary to review my inbox; first thing, lunch time and late afternoon.

As emails come in, I respond to those which I can answer straight away. And if I don't need them for future reference they are deleted. For those more important or those part of an ongoing project or topic I set up folders and often, sub-folders.

Then, once I have responded to that mail it's filed away where I can;

a) find it quickly and simply should I need to refer back to it and more importantly

b) it's out of my inbox.

For those emails I need to action later, I drag into TASKS, which automatically creates a new task. That email is then filed away for future reference etc, clearing my inbox. I then spend part of my day working through those tasks, setting reminders etc, including any additional correspondance. For those more urgent emails that don't warrant a task but perhaps I need to do some research into before responding - I set a flag.

For me, this works - my inbox is never over a screen page full so I can always see EVERYTHING and nothing ever gets missed. For me, if it goes below that bottom page you could run the risk of "out of sight out of mind" - I like to see everything. This is today's view of my inbox:

But of course, everyone does things differently, and everyone has methods that work for them in different ways. For example, my colleague Darren Strange, (Microsoft Office Product Manager) discusses how he does things on his blog - this works for him!

There is no right or wrong way to manage your inbox.....but the most important thing I think, is to ensure you control it and it doesn't control you! You need to find YOUR way to make it work for YOU. My way may help - I swear by it.....and for now....as the legend Frank Sinatra sings.......... "I'll do it my way"........

How do you manage your inbox? Is it spiraling out of control? Are you up until midnight "doing email?" Perhaps my way could help you!