emendatio

How often have you clicked on the SEND button within Outlook and in the very second you clicke you noticed that you made a mistake. Maybe you forgot the attachment, misspelled a word in the subject or put your boss on CC instead of your best work buddy?

I’ve been through all of these and I’d like to show you how Outlook Rules can help you avoid these situations. We will set up a rule that will “defer” emails from leaving your outbox after clicking the SEND button for some minutes.

Go to Tools in the menu bar, Rules and Alerts. There will a small window open up, click on New Rule.

Under “Start from a blank rule” (at the bottom of this list), choose Check messages after sending, and then click Next.

Click the Next button again on the “Which conditions do you want to check” screen. Another window will pop up with this dialog informing you that the rule will apply to all messages. You can also set this rule up to only work for certain people or groups.

On the next screen, check the box for “defer delivery by a number of minutes“, and then click on “a number of“. Change the defer minutes to something like 5 minutes (after a while I changed mine to 3 minutes, 5 minutes is way too long).

Click the Next button, and then give the rule a name, mine is “Don’t send out stupid emails!”

That’s it, you’re all set. When you click on the Send button right now, you will notice that the emails will stay in your Outbox for the specified number of minutes. Please note that when you edit an email within the Outbox (e.g. by double clicking on it) you will have to click the Send button again, otherwhise it will stay in the Outbox forever.

Reblogged from the Howtogeek Blog.

Have you ever received an email from your Messaging Administrator, telling you that your mailbox size is exceeding its limits? Or have you noticed that your Outlook is booting and working a bit slower every month? Well we all learned how to (auto) archive emails, delete old mails and keep our mailbox tidy and clean. But did you know that you Calendar can eat up lots of space as well? When you use your outlook over several months old appointments will still remain in the calendar file, including all attachments and pictures. This can turn into a real nightmare but fear no longer: here are a few tips on how to free your calendar.

(1) In your Outlook Calendar click on View > Current View > By Category

(2) Delete old Events
You can sort the upcoming list by date and delete old appointments. Depending on how long you’ve been using Outlook these entries might reach long into the past. Be careful not to delete recurring events as you might kill the entire series.

(3) Delete “big” appointments
This list doesn’t display the size of appointments by default, but you can easily add the Size field to the top of the table.


Right click on one of the header fields (”Subject”, “Location” etc.) and click on Customize Current View. In the upcoming Window click on Fields.

(4) Select Size and click on the Add -> Button

(5) Sort the list by Size and delete large attachments.

Voilà thats it, you’re done.

Bonus Tip:

There is actually another method to find large appointments in the Calendar.

1. In your Outlook Calendar menu, click on Tools, select Find, then Advanced Find.
2. 2. On the More Choices tab, at the bottom under Size, select the greater than option
3. 3. Input the maximum amount you want to see, for example 100.

We all have to work with excel now and then, some of us more frequently than others. Sometimes the excel file you’ll have to work on is more than just your typical 3 rows 5 columns birthday list comparison… yes sometimes its a huge table with thousands of data entries. In these cases its a pain to get an overview or find a specific data entry, build graphs or just find relevant information. There is of course a way to set filters to hide irrelevant data but a more elegant way is to use Pivot Tables. The Productivity Portfolio blog just published a nice introduction into this topic and explains how to set up a Pivot Table without losing your nerves:

Pivot tables are an Excel feature that you should learn how to use. Instead of analyzing rows upon rows of records, a pivot table can aggregate your data and show a new perspective with few clicks. You can also move columns to rows or vice versa. The problem is people believe creating a pivot table is too difficult to learn. Grab a seat and we’ll walk you through a short tutorial using Excel 2007.

Many of us are using Outlook 2007 at work for email communication and calendar management. In most cases your Outlook is connected to a MS Exchange server within the IT department of your company. This server handels all incoming and outgoing communication and redirects it to you. Quite often it also stores your email data on a storage server in the datacenter for security reasons. This is very nice as it prevents important data from getting lost in case your PC or notebook crashes. But there’s a drawback as well, as the storage capacity for your inbox in most cases is limited, at least it is for mine. Therefore, whenever I reach the limit of 100MB I get an email from my administrator telling me “your inbox is full“. Usually you’ll get the chance to clean your inbox and delete some old email. If you don’t do this, after time people who’d like to send you an email will get a failure message as well, telling them that your inbox could’nt store any more mails.

As deleting old email might work at first, it will be become more and more difficult over time as you will collect more and more emails “too precious” or too important to delete. Outlook included an auto archive feature which will put old emails in an archive file on your local disc. But what if you’d like to set up your own archive with your own folder structure, maybe with a special folder just for mails from your boss? Outlook has a nice feature to create your own data file with any name you’d like to store your emails, calendar entries etc. And this is how you set it up:

(1) Go to FILE -> NEW -> Outlook Data File

(Click image to enlarge)

(2) Select Office Outlook Personal Folders File
(if you’re using Outlook 2007)

(3) Save the data file somewhere on your harddrive
(or mobile storage device)

(4) Enter the name of your Outlook Data File
(and if you like a password secure it)

(5) Voilà. Your new archive folder.

Within this new Archive Folder you can create sub directories with whatever name you’d like. You can then simply drag and drop emails and calendar entries from your inbox into the archive folders, copy them and set rules to make Outlook move or copy them automatically. Of course you can also set intelligent search folders and flag items.

Have you heard, read (here or here) of or even installed the new Xobni plugin for MS Office? If not better hurry and do so because Xobni brings some nice features Outlook itself is missing. It installs as a fifth column (depending on your interface layout) and instantly starts scanning your mailbox. It took 25 minutes to scan all my mails and archives, giving you a nice coffee break. When you click on a mail the Xobni column will display a graphical overview on the frequency of your conversation with the respective person. The search function in my oppinion is a bit better and faster than the built in Outlook search engine.

As you can see on the image above, you even get the chance to insert a picture per person. You can call the person directly, the embedded skype links works great, send a new email or plan a meeting. Below this box you will find a list of people this person is connected to, a list of your most recent conversations and files you exchanged. While this is mostly just eyecandy especially the "Files exchanged with …" box is really helpful when you’re looking for that last excel sheet that your colleague send and you saved, well, somewhere.

Way more powerfull and a real productivity improvement tool are the analytic capabilities of Xobni. It tracks all your inoming and outgoing emails and calendar entries, collects all data and timestamps and puts it together and summarizes it.

On the screenshot aboice you can see an analysis of the mail traffic in my inbox. Well beside the obvious information about my starting time, lunch and the time I’m going home this gives a pretty good idea on my responsive behavior. But it gets even better, Xobni analytics also tracks your respone time, meaning how fast and often you respond to emails at what time of the day.

Looking at this information gives you a very good idea on how your behavior towards your inbox changes during the day. I noticed for myself that the respond time in the afternoon is a lot longer than in the morning. I spend some time investigating this and found out that most of the time I get the real "hard stuff", the mails that need the most effort, are send to me right after lunch. As I am usually a bit tired after eating this would be contra productive: beeing sleepy at the most heavy work of the day. I therefore moved my lunch break to 11am to be fit for work at 1pm.

I think there are still many ways to improve the analysis tool and way more data to track. I’d personally like to see how fast which person respons to my emails, what is the word ratio between send and received emails, how similar are the responses to my outgoing emails? It might also be a nice idea to get a graphical idea on the entire CC situation in your inbox: who also receives emails you get and how close are you to this person, do you also reply to him/ her, does he/ she send emails as well or only receives them?

One last thing I’d like to add, the improvement part of course. I would love to have the Xobni column as a widescreen row below the regular outlook interface. I can’t help it but the column is stealing way too much space on my screen. The second thing deals with memory usage. Since I’ve installed Xobni I noticed a small performance decrease in Outlook: it boots a bit slower and the indexing of long and complex emails often slows the entire machine.

Nevertheless Xobni is a fantastic tool and a lot more than just eye candy. If you use to track information, emails and contacts it will greatly improve your working speed with emails. Check out the website for some video intros.

Link: Xobni

A question i’ve been dealing with many times is how to organize my files in an uncomplicated but also easy-to-work-with way. On Donationcoder there’s a discussion about the My Documents quest, read the entry here. Lifehacker has also some interesting thougts on organizing the very own files, worth to have a look.

The most popular approaches for doc orga are:

• separating private/work/etc.
• alphabetical ordering
• time dependent (in progress/done)
• labeled files (i.e. tag2find)

There might be no perfect soloution how to organize as this is a very personal decision. But even if you think about it just for some minutes and and can improve it a litte bit, your daily workflow can be pushed one more level forward.

By the way, in this article i stumbled uopn a useful tool: The Hard Drive Janitor. This litte script can delete files in a specified folder after a given period of time. So apply it to your temp or download folder and stop deleting install files and temp stuff you’ve just needed for some days.

I wanted to write on this topic for quite a while now, mainly because I love the term Email Ninja. If you, like me, work in a huge company and in a position with a lot communication coming in and going out you may know the problem of an overwhelming inbox.

Leo Babauta, author of the Zen Habits blog gives a beautiful list of things to do to become an Email Ninja. I tried all of these advices over the last few weeks and I can’t praise them enough. Follow these rules and you will definitely get your grip on your inbox. Let me give you a short example by quoting his rule # 8:

Be liberal with the delete key. Too often we feel like we need to reply to every email. But we don’t. Ask yourself, “What’s the worst that will happen if I delete this?” If the answer isn’t too bad, just delete it and move on. You can’t reply to everything. Just choose the most important ones, and reply to them. If you limit the emails you actually reply to or take action on, you get the most important stuff done in the least amount of time. Pareto and all that.

Link: Leo Babauta - 10 Steps to Become an Email Ninja

With my thesis on e-learning finished I still have a huge interest the topic and on the question how to make online learning more effective. As e-learning is in many ways different from traditional learning you still try to reach the same goal: understand a topic, find a solution or just reach out for something new. John Wesley from Pickthebrain.com puts it this way: Effective online education goes beyond finding answers. It requires you to process numerous information sources, evaluate them based on credibility and relevance, and piece together a mosaic-like picture of the truth.

I would love to give out some parts of my thesis here but as it is locked under NDA I can’t give out anything here. Therefore I highly recommend John Wesleys article on How to Educate Yourself Online. Although you could write many books on the topic, this short article gives a brief but very good idea of the improvement process on online learning.

Link: Pickthebrain.com - How to Educate Yourself Online

Have you ever been in a situation, project or program where you had difficulties to finish, to reach the goal? Quite often these if no real problem that’s holding us back, many of us just have a problem to accomplish things. Cal Newport from Study Hacks gives us an insight of his view on these challenges and he explains what accomplished people do differently:

From my experience, the most common trait you will consistently observe in accomplished people is an obsession with completion. Once a project falls into their horizon, they crave, almost compulsively, to finish it. If they’re organized, this might happen in scheduled chunks. If they’re not — like many — this might happen in all-nighters. But they get it done. Fast and consistently.

Link: Cal Newport - The Art of the Finish

The issue of backing up your important data is a topic of high interest for everyone dealing with critical data. Some time ago, i thougt about how to manage the backup of my daily documents as simple as possible. As my requirements, i name these:

• Most of my data is saved in more or less small text-like files
• I want to back up on various sources with only one step
• Storage capacity should be great enough for dealing with my files in a long term perspective
• Online backup for the purpose of a crash of my local system

And after a while, i came out with this simple, but (IMHO) powerful solution:

Create a Mailing List for your Backup Process.

So why? GMail as well as Yahoo Mail and others offer enough e-mail space for saving tons of stuff in there. So why don’t use it? The integrated search function makes it taste even more sweeter. Just send one e-mail and back up in several locations. Automatic filter enable to label every e-mail (i.e. i use ‘contains <<backup>>’ in the subject) and being categorized in the backup-folder in your e-mail account.

Which providers to choose for backup is a question of everyone’s purposes and needs. While even services like box.net, Zoho or Google Docs offer an e-mail upload feature, the mailing list can be expanded as needed. Just a few recommondations for those who are not that deep in the topic:

• Yahoo Mail - unlimited storage
• GMail - several gigs, feels like unlimited storage
• GMX - the Mediacenter is also worth a look
• box.net - just send an e-mail to upload@box.net from your registered e-mail account
• Zoho - good GDocs alternative
• GDocs - has an e-mail file-upload, too.

Just one more thing: If you download your mail via POP, disable deleting the e-mails on the server. Otherwise, your mailing list is nothing more than a waste of traffic.