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Take Control of E-mail

Today I decided to stop the madness. An email every few minutes and desktop alert + sound to go with it makes it to easy to lose focus on my task at hand and look at my inbox. While I loved this feature when Outlook came out, it's become my achilles heal of productivity. No more.

  1. Tools->Options
  2. Click E-mail Options...
  3. Click Advanced E-mail Options...
  4. Uncheck:
    1. Play a Sound
    2. Briefly change the mouse cursor
    3. Show an envelope in the notification area
    4. Display a New Mail Desktop Alert (default Inbox only)

I highly recommend reading The Tyranny of Email. Do email on your time.

Published Saturday, March 05, 2005 2:47 AM by omars
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Comments

# Well done

Friday, March 04, 2005 7:35 PM by fransisco d'orcini
Well done for realising email is almost entirely batchable.

Jeez, you would have thought Microsoft taught people basic productivity skills...

# re: Take Control of E-mail

Friday, March 04, 2005 10:46 PM by Stephane R

What about simply shutting down Outlook for the next two hours?

# re: Take Control of E-mail

Saturday, March 05, 2005 12:02 AM by Jonathan Hardwick [MSFT]
I did the same a couple of weeks ago. Now I switch to Outlook when I *want* to process email. Very liberating. The problem is that everyone around me is still interrupt-driven, but I'm working on that...

"The Tyranny of Email" (and its followup) has also been published by ChangeThis, as http://www.changethis.com/10.TyrannyOfEmail

# re: Take Control of E-mail

Saturday, March 05, 2005 12:58 AM by Tommi
Why not just configure the client to check for new emails every 60minutes or 120minutes?

# re: Take Control of E-mail

Tuesday, March 08, 2005 12:41 AM by Nektar
Still there is no way that you can make Outlook start automatically when Windows starts and also minimize to the system tray.

# re: Too much email

Tuesday, March 15, 2005 3:15 AM by Maybe it
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