All right. And now what I'd like to do is, as I kick this thing off, I will let you know one of the interesting things that I myself learned by doing a program this close to the holidays. Looks like the majority of the people that are going to be viewing this program are probably actually going to be seeing it on the replay. So all of you that are viewing this on the replay Welcome to today's program. For those of you that are here with me in the live webinar session all across the United States and even several people from Canada. I'd like to welcome all of you to as we as you know, we are going to be doing this program it's going to last about 90 minutes is the plan and we're going to be covering probably my most popular program taming the email beast.

And what I'm going to do in today's program is I'm going to be covering specific strategies in both Microsoft Outlook and also g Gmail. And so knowing that a lot of you probably use Outlook at work, some of you may use Gmail at work, but almost all of you also have a personal Gmail account. Hopefully, you'll find that this program is quite relevant and useful in both platforms. Although I will tell you that if any of you are using something other than those two programs, I still think this program can be very valuable. Basically, just because you can take a look at the strategies we're sharing here and use them in whatever email system you're using. I think the strategies are transferable.

You may have to take a little peek to see if the technique is a little bit different in the software that you're actively using. So with that, I really want to dive into this. Many of you I know already know who I am. My name is Randy Dean. I have been leading programs on time, productivity and tech management for about 30 years. I actually looked as you can see right here on the front screen 2006 was the first year I actually presented this program.

So I've now been leading this teaming email program for about 13 years. And what was interesting I started the company a little more than 15 years ago. And the first couple years I was basically just doing sort of general time management utilizing technology like Microsoft Outlook. And I was even still teaching a few planner clients way back then, remember the time designs and Franklin Covey's and what I was discovering a year or two into the businesses that people were, you know, in my time management sessions coming up to me going Randy, this email thing, this is what's driving me crazy. I can't get on top of my emails driving me absolutely nuts. And so what being a person with a business background MBA marketing finance started my own company, I'm like, ooh, business opportunity.

And so that's what caused me to develop this specific program on how to better manage your email. And that program turned into a book which became an Amazon bestseller and now I've been going all over the United States, Canada, and he In Europe several times teaching this program become pretty well known as a totally obsessed time management guy an email saying it guy. So now you can see me, here I am, this is a little bit more true to form. Those of you that have been to my live programs, no, I am this way. And the one key thing that I want to share with you here is that, um, you know, critically, I'm going to give you too many ideas. And so what I'd like you to do in today's program is please don't feel like you have to take everything in.

What I'd rather you do is instead look for the 234 critical tips that you're going to get off today's session. That will really help your personal email situation because you get 234 good tips out of today's program that you can actually leave and use and start saving time. You're going to get this time back this 90 minutes back quickly, and then you're going to get into bonus time you are never going to have before. I'd also like you to look for one or two tips. Maybe not for you but for that person around you who's driving you Just a little bit crazy, because that person that never responds your email, because they have 3974 in their inbox right now. And some of you're probably thinking, that's me.

That's why I'm here. Also, what about that person that likes to carbon copy everybody on everything? Or here's one of my favorites, the person that likes to hit reply all to the large group message. And here's what they write in their reply all everyone. Thanks for get that person. Actually, in today's program, I'm going to show you how to stop that there's a way you can easily stop that.

And, or just that person that, you know, never seems to be working on the right thing at the right time because they're basically managing their entire day out of their email inbox by marking stuff on red flags and stuff or star and stuff. Wait, doesn't everybody do that? And so what we're going to do is we're gonna show you a different way to manage your stuff today. But what I'd like you to do is look for those one or two tips. The person that's driving you nuts because what I'll do for everybody on today's call, I'm going to send you a bonus email coming out of today's session, which will have several different PDF documents. One of them is called all things email.

And in that bonus PDF, I'm going to give you links to a whole bunch of other PDF articles, documents and tip sheets on effective email management. So you could actually look at today's program as your starting point for better email management, but you can take this as deep as you would like. I'm also going to be providing you a couple bonus YouTube video links that I've created that I think you're going to find highly useful as a follow up from today's program. So all of that's coming to everybody who's here on the program, and those of you that are viewing this on the replay on my e Learning Academy. I'll post all of those links and videos into the program after today's program is done. So basically, I'm hoping that today will be the start of your process, not the end all be all.

So we set the table but by the way, when you Get those PDFs, you could forward them on to that person driving you nuts. And maybe they'll listen to me and not you. Okay? Just something to remember. All right. So let's get in.

Let's see if you've made up or career choice. And you know what, this is sort of fun. Do me a favor. What I'd like you to do is use your question tool, because that's probably the best way to communicate with me, because we have so many different people logged in around the North America here today. I would like you to use the question field if you need to get in touch with me for any reason, so this is a good way to test it out. I'd like to see if you've made a poor career choice.

And what I'd like you to do is type in what is your guess? To the average number of hours the average professional email user spends each and every day? simply reading responding to an administrator emails, type your answer of number of hours into the question field right now let's see what we get. All right, we've got a range Oh, hold Look at range two to eight. This is sort of fun to watch, too. It's fun watching these come in real time.

Because I can tell there's a couple people here that are oh my gosh, are they doing some seriously heavy email work? Couple of you not too bad. And so what I'd like to do is just share with you the interesting thing. Not a single person answered below this, by the way, the actual answer is a little bit more than two hours per day. So the average typical person is spending two hours per day, but not a single person on today's program answered below that, which means almost all of you are doing two or more hours per day and some of you are doing six to eight hours a day per the answers I just received. Oh my gosh.

Wow, you know what that means? Let's think about this. These statistics are a little bit daunting. 25 to 50% of your day is doing email. And now let me share with you the interesting thing. of statistics, I spoke at a big conference event in Las Vegas a couple summers ago.

There was 550 people in the audience, still the largest group I've spoken to, but I've spoken to several other groups, three 400 people over the years. I mean, it happens, you know, a couple three times a year, I'm in front of really big audiences. I ask a follow up question. How many of you before today have had a formal strategic level email management course. And you know, what I'm seeing pretty consistently around the United States, Canada and Europe, only about one to 3% one to 3% of working professionals have had training on a tool that often takes 25 to 50% or more of each and every day, all by Gosh, which has frankly been very good for yours truly. How to get away with not having a real job for more than 15 years, find a niche like that and dive in.

But what that means is how did you learn to use your email here it is jump in and swim. FYI figured out on your own That's not what it really stands for, or this thing I like to call office as Moses. Wait, wait, what are you doing over there? Oh, I'm gonna do that too. Which means that you've self taught yourself how to manage your inbox. And you probably have some decent habits, but you also have some crazy habits.

Let's talk about the first one right here. Each and every email each and every email, the average user looks at it three to seven times before taking smart action upon it three to seven times. Now Guess what? It's time for your first little tip. And I'm going to jump into my Microsoft Outlook because I want to see if I'm looking into your soul, tell me if I'm looking into your soul, so let's pop into my outlook. Okay, Who's jealous like that.

But here's the thing you want to really hate me I left those in here. So I'd have something to show you today. Although what's sort of funny is while we're in the session, watch this one here. I've got a second inbox. Let's see how many pile into this one while we're actively leaving the program. But here's what I want to share with you.

The reason that This inbox is so clean. It's not because I've gotten everything done. All it means is that everything that's come into this inbox has been effectively and appropriately processed. And if I couldn't deal with it, now it moves out of the sandbox into one of my two primary day to day planning tools, any ideas what those two planning tools might be? I'll let you think about that for a second. They're actually on the screen right now.

You can see them tasks, and calendar, your task list in your calendar. Now, this is Microsoft Outlook, obviously. And so here's your first little tip, if you're an outlook users, some of you might be looking at my screen going, Oh my gosh, he's using a different version of Outlook. Let me alleviate that concern and give you a master tip regardless of whether using Outlook or Gmail. Whenever you see this right here, see these three little dots. I wish they put the word more there, because if somebody put the word more, you might actually click on that and see what's under there.

Check this out. I'm gonna Click on these three dots and it gives me this option to go to navigation options. And when I go into navigation options, I'm going to click on the little checkbox for compact navigation. Hit OK. And look what it just did. It just changed the screen. Now instead of words, I have icons.

And guess what I really honestly don't care which way you use this. If you're a Microsoft Outlook user, all I care is that on your screen, you can see your functions in icon form, email, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes, or in word form. Now as I'm doing the program today, I'm going to switch back to the word form for the outlook users on today's call because it's a little easier for you to see what I'm doing. But I promise you everything I'm showing you in today's program works regardless of whether you have the icons on your screen, or the words on your screen. Now when I say that though, I want to share something additional here. One thing I have seen some people with icons on the screen, do notice This, I can put my mouse over here to the side and I'll get a drag bar.

And I see a lot of people have it dragged over like this. And here's the thing all they can see that our email, calendar and context they can't see their task function. If after today's program, you decide that you want too much more assertively and consistently, use your outlook task tool, I strongly recommend that you take this bar and drag it over so that you can at least see your tasks. And maybe your notes in Outlook. Although I will tell you this note item that you see right here is not the same as Microsoft OneNote. So if you're using OneNote, you would actually instead want to use your web login manager for OneNote.

I cover that in my related program called optimizing your outlook. So we're not going to cover that too deeply today, but I just wanted to share this with you. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Let's go to the Gmail users for a minute look at this email calendar context tasks notes. Let me show you something Gmail users don't notice my inbox in Gmail.

Is 50% more messy? It's me now. But let me show you a little something that you probably haven't noticed before. Notice that if I take my screen, I'm going to do a little resizing here on my screen so that I can see my full control panel and my webinar control panel. So, but I wanted to show you something this this happened a little over a year ago, they did a little reef Merman of the Gmail front screen. And I just want to show you something they did when they did this reformat.

Did you notice they created these little buttons over here? Now take a look at this. This is Google tasks. And you can have a window for Google tasks and hold on a second. Wait, let's go into my Google Calendar. And I want to show you something you can have your tasks open in both oh look at that.

There's my reminder to have my webinar which you're currently on right now. I think that's funny. But take a look at this. You can have the task list view in both calendar in Gmail. And in your Gmail inbox. Hold on, there's more.

Here's keep which is equivalent. That's Google's version of Microsoft OneNote. So you can have your notepad and take a look at this. Here's Google Calendar. So you can see your email and a little window of today's calendar. But hold on wait, there's more.

Take a look at this. If you pop this little pop up tab, that will open up a full page view of your calendar. Wait a minute, email, calendar, tasks, notes, we're missing one, hold on a second. See this little thing up here called I call it the Google Rubik. It looks like a Rubik's Cube. You open it up.

It's got it's a launch pad all of these really popular Google Apps. And notice right here contacts and if you click on that, it opens up a full page manager of your Google Contacts, email, calendar, contacts, tasks notes. So this is basic setup that you have when you are utilizing your tools. And the reason I like to share this, even if you're an outlook user, if you have a personal gmail account. The reason I like to share this at the beginning of this program, this could be your platform, this Google suite of tools, Google Calendar, Gmail, Google Contacts, Google Keep. All of those could be your platform for your personal stuff.

If you want to keep your work stuff and your personal stuff separate, thus, meaning you could make your outlook 100% work focused, you could use your Google tools to manage all of your personal stuff, your personal calendar, your personal task list, and firewall them from each other. And if you have the appropriate suite of apps on both devices, and both platforms, you can actually access all your stuff on your iPhone or Android, you can actually have matching apps for all of these Google functions that I just showed. And listen to this if you're happen to be a Microsoft Outlook user. If you have the outlook comm app that will bring in your email that is related to your office 365 email account. It will also bring in your related calendar to your office 365 account. And if you use the search field in the outlook.com app, it allows you to access your entire list of contacts in your office 365 dot com account.

And additionally, if you have the app called Microsoft to do to do, you can access your task list that is in your Microsoft Outlook right here, you can access that task list using the to do app. And if you have, of course OneNote, you've got the full suite of tools. So what that means is that you can have email, calendar, contacts, tasks and notes for both outlook using Office 365. And using the Google suite tools, and be able to access both of those sets of data and information on both sets of devices and both platforms from wherever you're at, which is critically important because that means you got your stuff on your phone when you're away from your computer and vice versa. So, now today's program is going to be focused more specifically on utilizing these on your computer utilizing either Gmail or outlook. But I wanted to share that little piece at the beginning so that you would have some information on how you can set up your entire suite of tools when it comes to utilizing Outlook or the Google suite.

And yes, I already mentioned the later program I'm going to be doing on optimizing your Outlook, which will probably be announced next year, I will also be announcing a program called time management in the cloud using the Google suite which will also be delivered early next year. So those of you that want to take step number two, you'll have an option. And since you signed up today, I'm not gonna speak about this loudly. I'm gonna give you a big discount. So um, let's take a look at next steps here. But what I wanted to do was this so I, you know, I sort of went a little bit off script there to talk about the fact that you're looking at your emails three to seven times each.

Let's go back to that thought real quick. three to seven times each. Let me tell you why. Here's what I see people do. All the time, they get that new email, they open it up. They read it just a little bit.

And they go, you know what, I don't have time for this right now. So I'm gonna come up here and I'm gonna mark it and read or no, no, you know what I'll do. I'll instead I'll come over here and I'll turn on the little flag. Hey, do me a favor type yes in the question field if you mark unread or flag. And if you're a gmail user type Yes. In the question field, if you're storing your emails in your inbox, Just do me a favor and type that I want to see if you're doing some of this, because this is what I'm seeing people do all the time.

Yeah, we're getting quite a few yeses right here. Thank you for being willing to admit your admit your email management flaw, because let me explain to you why that's a flaw. What did you just guarantee you have to do with that email again later when you mark something on red flag and or star it? Yep, that's right. You got to read it again. And again.

And here's the dark ugly side of this. Not only are you guaranteed you have to read it over and over again and variably aren't they gonna start stacking on you, they're gonna start to stack. And at some point, see this little gray line here on the bottom. And there's comparable bottom of the screen, of course, in your Gmail, once they hit that line and go below it, they will never be seen or acted upon ever again. If I correct, so the person sends you yet another email going, Hey, why didn't you get this done, which starts all over again. Do you see why it's insidious?

Those two tools, I think are a big part of the problem people have with managing their email. I'm doing something very different today. I don't use either of those tools. I don't use the flags or stars and I don't mark my messages on red, I'm doing something different, which I believe is almost just as fast. It's built right into both software systems. But it greatly reduces the number of times I'm reading each and every email.

All right, and just imagine this, imagine if you went from three to seven times with every email down to once, maybe twice Next, how much time would that save you over a year. So we're going to expose that. So let's go back to this though, because there's more that you need to see here. Let's go back to this first slide. So we talked about three, seven times each guess what else you're doing. You're looking at your inbox, the statistics I've been seeing.

There's a few different studies out there, anywhere from 15 to 40 times a day you go check your email. Wait, how many hours you work and how many times per hour you check in that inbox, squirrel. It's a squirrel, isn't it? And it keeps grabbing your attention. And wait till you hear the statistics on this a little bit later. I'm going to share with you information from a scientific research study about what happens when you're checking your email, voicemail and text messages too often throughout the day.

Additionally, the average worker spent anywhere from one to two hours a day on personal stuff a lot of its personal email and or text messaging and or social media during the regular work day. Hmm, you know I have to be a little bit cautious getting to our to our I have about that because the statistics have actually shown that people that take some breaks periodically throughout the day to either check social media or check their personal email actually might be more productive than people that never do because it gives them a mental break. And it allows them to connect with their hive, so to speak. keeping their social connection keeps them a little more positive. Um, but I do want you to be aware of this. I mean, you know, if you're, if you're thinking about productivity for your firm, that's pretty significant.

Additionally, because you don't have good organizational systems. I actually spoke at a big conference in Florida yesterday, my last out of state trip for 2019. And the whole discussion of that session was how to deal with inputs clutter and distraction. Wow. One to two hours a day if you don't have appropriate file and organizational structures in both your email on your computer and with your physical paper documents, and 82% of all emails now sent globally are junk or spam. Wow.

Look at this one slide isn't amazing anybody ever gets anything of value done ever seriously. And this is just email, when you add into the fact that 13% of you are clinically addicted to your smartphone devices, and that you're checking your smartphone device anywhere from 50 to 150 times per day. Wow, email and all of these other information tools and input management tools are costing your organization dollars, not just email, email, social media, it's text messaging, it's is all of these are costing your organization money. Email is going from a productivity tool to being a cost center for a lot of organizations. You know, people that bring me in and say, you know, we used to see email as a productive productivity tool, and now, it's almost become a nuisance. I'm sure many of you on today's call or believe in that, but I want you to go back in time.

I want you to go back in time and by the way, When we mentioned this, it's not just the dollars. Look at the bottom of screen. Stress, fatigue, anxiety. morale problems is what you get when you're constantly a never ending lead bombarded by information that you can't keep up with. You got to have some strategies. I want you to go back in time remember late 80s, early 90s when email first turned on, do you remember that I remember working my first job right out of undergrad, it was like end of 80s, early 1990s.

I've got my first email account. remember way back, you've got now clear if anybody out here still has an AOL account, there might be a couple of Yeah. But um, what's interesting is, um, I remember I was sitting in my office, and I'm putting together an email and I'm sending out and receiving a couple emails, I'm thinking, Oh, by, this is gonna help. This is going to really help. I got this little question. I can just send it to the person that's on the other side.

Side of the building, I really have to get up and walk all the way over there. And then, as long as I'm a little bit patient it a little while I'm going to get a response. This is gonna save me a ton of time. Email can be that tool again, when you use it properly, email can be a very powerful productivity tool that contributes to not just your company's productivity and profitability, but your own personal productivity. And so we're gonna share our strategies here today on how this can work for you. And so let's dive in.

Let's get into this now first strategy I want to share with you is the one that's going to help you knock down your clutter. I don't know if you're like me, I've already got plans for over the holidays. Since we're heading into the holiday season here. I usually pick one or two home based clutter reduction projects. And I've actually got a pretty cool idea on how I can make my home office look much cleaner nicer because I want to do some video filming for my youtube channel in it this year. As well as reconfigure the storage area in the back of my basement to make all of this work so much better.

So, if you're wondering what I'm going to be doing over the holidays, that's at least one of my projects, and I always recommend to you, you know, just one part of your house, every holiday season one part of your house, clean out a closet, it'll make you just feel better. It's my gift to you for the holiday season, you're getting all dirty in your closet. But, um, you want to get rid of the clutter on your desk, in your inbox, and maybe even your kitchen counter at home. I've been following this strategy for 30 years. One of the very first things I learned about email and Information Management, I learned it literally late 1980s, early 90s by a guy named David Allen, he gave me some of the core pieces of this sort of adjusted over time for this. And what it basically has is two parts, three minute one touch one I don't think David Allen invented the one touch rule.

This was here long before him and it's an old paper based strategy from when things We're all in document form, carbon copy meant three sheets of paper with the carbon slip in the middle. Okay, so we're going back into the 1980s, before email really became a thing. And here's what it said, every piece of information you get, you should touch one time, one time, and the very first time you touch that new document or file, you don't set it down until you know what you need to do with it, you make a decision. So the primary thing is, if you're going to touch a new piece of paper, you're going to look at a new piece of paper. You don't set it down until you make a decision. But wait a minute, we don't just have paper.

Now we have email, voicemail, text messages, I ns, etc. We got a lot of input streams that are coming into us. just expand it to all of those input streams. If you're going to touch something, look at something listen to something voicemail. Don't stop touching it, looking at it, listen to it, until you know what you need to do with it first time every time. So here's the goal.

Here's what I want you Do I want you every time you look at a new piece of information that comes in to you, if you're going to give your attention to that new item, you just made a new deal with yourself. And the deal is real simple. I'm not going to stop looking at this listening to it or touching it until I know what I need to do with it first time every time. All right, which flies in the face of modern email usage statistics, the average working professional looks at each and every item three to seven times because what they're doing instead is they're open it, they're reading it just a little bit. They're deciding they don't have time for that right now. Then they're marketing on red flagging it or storing it so they can go look at it again later.

And they're causing themselves a lot of lost time due to excessive and unnecessary rework every time they do that. If you don't have the time to make a decision, I'm going to argue you don't have time to open it up and read it in the first place. Does that make sense? I hope that makes clear crystal sense. Now I did get challenged on this. When I was doing one of my university sessions, I had a professor in the room and it was sort of funny interaction.

He goes, Mr. Dean knows how he said, Mr. Because he was a doctor. He was, Mr. Dean, I have an inherent problem with your system already. Sometimes you can't just make a decision. Sometimes, you got to think about it. Sometimes you need to ponder the appropriate response. Therefore, your system shall not work.

I actually started to get like, Oh, actually, you just identified the task. He goes, I did. I go, yeah, ponder this email. Think about it. That's the task. Put that right on your task list.

Think about appropriate response to this email. See what I want you to get down to, I want you to get granular here. I want you to get down to what's the very next thing you need to do. Because if you can get down to that, then you're not going to have to reread it over and over again. Okay, plus his brain sort short circuited in that moment, which was a lot of fun to see now. So this is part one.

Now I want to share something with you here. I got to make a disclaimer. Some of you're probably thinking, Randy, hold on a second, what if things are on fire? And see, here's sort of the interesting thing I'm telling you, if you're gonna open something, you read it, and you keep looking at it till you make a decision. Because if you don't have enough time to make a decision, why are you looking at it in the first place? Which leads into a discussion about fighting the active fire.

See, sometimes you're in there because something's on fire. Right? And by the way, if the house is burning down around you, why are you checking your new messages? Now? I did have a personal session not too long ago. Randy, what if the reason I'm checking my messages in my other input streams is because it has in there how to put out the fire.

Okay, I'll give some credence to that. Do not follow the strategy. I'm sharing with you. Right now, when you're actively fighting a fire dealing with some sort of a crisis, if you're in crisis mode, you do a completely different operating system. Here's what I want you to do. Open up your email, open up your voicemail, open up your text messaging, or I am scan the subject lines, user names and or phone numbers to go directly to the item related to the fire that you're actively fighting right now and put out that fire.

Don't look at or get caught by anything else, you're going to get burned. Does that make sense? I hope that makes sense. So in firefighting mode, your 100% focus is how do I put out this fire and I can't get distracted by anything else. Okay, this strategy I'm sharing with you on the screen right now assumes your fires have been put out, and now you're doing normal processing of your new items. Which means if you're going to look at something new, you're not going to stop looking at it until you Know what you need to do with it.

So that's the one touch rule. That's an Information Management classic that's been around forever. But that David Allen guy mentioned earlier, he did some genius, he put a time based Decision Matrix on top of this thing. This was his wrinkle of genius, in my opinion. Here's what he said. And if you look at that thing, and the thing you need to do takes you a couple minutes or less do that now.

Don't save quick stuff for later. This is essential. If you want to keep up with your input management, you've got to get really good at this. And when you think about it, there's a ton of inherent logic right here. First thing, if you're not dealing with those quick little things, the first time you see them, and you're getting a pretty heavy flow of items coming in. Might they not just stack up and bury you?

How many of you feel a little bit buried by a whole bunch of little stuff. My argument is you're probably not keeping the quick little items moving. They're getting stuck. And they're stacking. Let's let's just think about the inherent logic of this action to think about this quick little email just takes you 30 seconds to write the reply, or a minute to look up a piece of information and forward it on or a minute to fill out the link through to the online web form and hit Submit or a minute to reply to the voicemail at a time when you know the other party cannot answer their phone. So you catch their voicemail to a good tip.

And and then you take any of those items I just described. By the time you've looked at any one of them three times before doing it. You just doubled your work. You're doubling your work when you're keeping quick stuff for later. So do you see what I want you to do? I want you to get ruthless with quick little things.

I want you to just train yourself. I gotta keep the quick stuff moving. I can't let it get stuck on my computer on my desk. Quick stuff must go here's a good way To remember, let's go to Ohio, Ohio. Yes. Only handle it once.

All right. That's my mantra. Now I have to tell you right here, I got challenged again. But I had a little more compassion for the woman who stopped me right here at this point, my presentation. Here's what she said. She goes, Randy, I hear you.

But here's my problem. Pretty simple problem. If I do what you just said, right here, this is all I'd ever do. This is it. I'm getting 200 plus emails a day. I'm figuring the average one takes me anywhere from two to five minutes to handle it properly.

And that means an average time of about three and a half minutes per message. I stopped and look there and go. You do realize that's basically impossible. She goes What do you mean I go the math on that. That's 10 and a half hours of work, doing nothing but your inbox, no breaks, getting none of your major project or client work done. She knows exactly.

I go, ooh, you're not going to like what I'm about to say. emails, not your problem. Email is the symptom of a much larger problem. Anybody know what the problem is? It should be right there in front of your face. What's the problem?

Yeah, I'll tell you right now. It's called job design. Her job is not designed properly. She has so many inputs coming into her position, that she cannot keep up and get to her primary work. That's broken. This is a test point right here.

Can you get through these first two steps and still get some of your primary work done? And if the answer that question is no, that might indicate that even regardless of the best email management system in the world, you've got an input flow management problem and you need to elevate the discussion. You need to take it to another level you need to talk with whoever it is that you're reporting to. and say, Hey, here's what's going on, I'm getting this many inputs. I'm spending this much time every day doing those inputs. And that's why I'm not getting my critical focus work done.

What can we do to alleviate this? Probably mean, some of the things are going to be coming off of your plate, maybe some of these input streams are going to have to get managed to somebody else that's being strategic about how you manage this stuff. I think this is a very good test. So a lot of people when they come into my program, they ask themselves a question, is it me? Or is it the job? Is it just because I'm disorganized and don't have good systems in place?

Or is it the actual work? That is the problem? This is a test I think for a lot of people right here to determine whether that's the case, so give it a try. See what happens. Now, can you give me another little wrinkle on that story? I just told you, the person who told me what was going on this is this is sort of crazy.

I found out in a following conversation with her that she was a high end salesperson selling a high ticket dollar item product or service with a high margin of profit. And she was getting so many requests for information on that product and service couldn't keep up. Tell me the solution that's right there in front of your face. What does she need? That's right. She needs another salesperson.

They're leaving money on the table. That's what I said. She goes, Yeah, I've been advocating it for about a year and they still won't hire the new person. That's insane. If you can spend $1 to make five you should spend every dollar you have. But she ended up telling me at some point that she ended up moving on to a new organization because they weren't supporting the sales process properly.

Isn't that fascinating? So just want to just look at this. Now you're probably gonna wait, I thought we were gonna get a bunch of Outlook and Google tips, we're going to get a really killer Google tip. All right. I'm going to step off my soapbox now about these first two steps, and I'm going to give you your first very big outlook and Gmail tip of the program. is a very big tip.

I hope I have your attention. Randy What if this thing takes more than a couple minutes? Well, let's pop back out to my outlook. Now, something new I learned by the way, I want to show you some sort of cool. Some of you here may find this very interesting. This is sort of a good and bad I'm not even sure I want to share this little tip with you.

Outlook users Did you know that you can open up an email, and if you want, you can actually with that open email, change things, change text in the subject line without having to do a sender forward, and just hit save. And when you do that, and you close it, it changed the text. You can actually change subject lines of your emails. And here's where this might be beautiful. For some of you. Let's say you want to put that email into a folder later on.

You could change the text on your message before you put it into the folder, adding in critical keywords of the project client activity event, whatever it is making it easier if you need to search your mail later. To find that same message, aha, little cool bonus tip for you right there. But that's not the tip. Here's the tip. Notice I have this test email to show you how to do task calendar contact conversions, but my actual task for being here with all of you today is to get to those bonus PDFs I mentioned started the program and the YouTube video links. Hmm.

So wait, the subject line of the email does not match the actual task inside the email. Does the subject line of an email ever match the project person client or task it's related to almost never do me a favor from this point forward? When you're composing an email make the subject line a little bit more project person client task oriented. So the recipient of the message has some idea of what they're about to get into a little additional follow up tip on that. Let's say you've been trading emails 678 times to somebody and now you're talking about something completely different. You can change the subject line again so both parties know you're talking about something difference.

And once again, won't that maybe help you with finding your emails a little bit later too. But that's not the tip. That's a little bit of etiquette. Let's talk about this, this email, send you those PDFs, I want to add this to my task list. Now watch what I'm gonna do, I'm going to switch back to words to make this a little easier for you to see what I'm doing. So once again, I just click the three dots turn off compact navigation on back to work.

Now watch what I can do. I'm going to take this email, I'm going to do a left click, I'm going to hold the click and I'm gonna drag it down to tasks and drop it. That creates a brand new task in Microsoft Outlook. Now, of course, I need to change the subject line to what the actual task is. Oops, that was fun. Everything just went crazy.

Love it with the fast fingers. Do it a live presentation. Let's try this again. Said PDFs webinar. That's for you guys. Dude, I'll see you later today might actually happen tomorrow priority.

High no Just what I did here with categories outlook users, by the way, timeout, how long does it take to get to right there is a subject line, set due date set priority, and open up my categories. What is that like 10 seconds 10 seconds. It's about as fast as marking an email unread or putting a flag on it. But you see why it's better. I'm now telling exactly what I need to do in the subject line. And a lot of times, like in this case, I don't even need to open this email again, I can just get it done when it's time to get it done.

Okay, that's why it's better than mark on red flags. But now notice this see these categories, all of you outlook users take a look what you can do, you can come down here to the bottom and hit all categories. And then what you can do is they have the color codes, you probably right now have red category, green category, blue category, purple category, ah, go off on one of these, click on it, and then come over here and hit rename. Because when you hit rename, what happens is you can actually change them from being the categories to being your key projects, clients, customers, vendors, coworkers, you're creating a list of usable labels. And look what I did on this one email, I put it in the primary project, the person that's related to, and the secondary sub project. And then when I hit OK, it's already tagged as tact.

Now, when I do my optimizing your outlook program, I can find this one task and all three buckets. Isn't that interesting? And all three tasks list one task in three lists. 1015 seconds. That's what I'm recommending you do if you want to turn it into a task and use your outlook. Now, do you have to use Microsoft Outlook?

Not necessarily. How many of you instead, do your daily sticky notes? That's your task that's already a big sheet of paper. Or maybe you're still using a planner task list. Or maybe you've got a smartphone or tablet task app. We already talked about Microsoft to do.

There's also the Google tasks app. If you're using the Google task tool in your Gmail And maybe you're just putting these in as reminders on your calendar. I honestly don't care how you do it all it cares if you can't get it done. Now, don't mark it unread. Don't flag it, move it to your task list or calendar instead. So you're not having to reread them all the time.

And when you think about this, when you think about this, here's part of the reason my inbox is so clean. As I mentioned briefly earlier, I'm using my inbox for receiving and processing new items. That's it. I'm not using it for any other reason. If it's quick, I get it done right then if it's not quick, it moves into my task list or calendar. And then if I've done one of those three things, get it done, get it into my task list or get it into my calendar.

Do I need it in my inbox anymore? I'm gonna say probably not We'll come back to that in a minute. But I want to go back to this outlook task real quick. So, you know, like I said, I really don't care which one of these tools you use. But I want to show you one critical reason I really like this outlook tool for Outlook users. Notice what happened right here.

When I created that test, remember, was a left click, hold the click, drag it down to test drop, it pops up task window, change subject line to a task is set due dates at priority turn on those categories for cross referencing and labeling. By the way, if you're a gmail user, this is remarkably similar to the labels option you have in Gmail, which we'll be talking about just a little bit later. But here's the critical piece looks down here. Yes, the text of the message. You see what that means? In a few seconds flat.

Not only can I clearly identify the task, due date, priority, and what it's related to, but I have the text of the message inside the task. I really don't need that in my inbox anymore. It's Right here 1015 seconds. Now I know some of you that are outlook user probably right now going okay, that's super cool. I like that a lot left click, hold the click, drag it to task, pop up the task window, change subject line to what the task is set due dates and priority. Turn on the categories for cross referencing and search, text the message inside there.

I like that. I like that a lot. But I have one major problem with what this guy just did one major problem. I'm not regularly using Outlook tasks. If I do it, this guy just did. I might never see that task or that email ever again.

Think of it? Well, it's close. Reminder, Save and Close. And boom, do it. There it is. Look at this.

If you don't trust yourself when you first switch to this system. As you're creating tasks in Outlook, turn on a reminder so that the tasks pop up when you need to see them again later. And then you can do what pretty much everyone in North America does one of these pops up Sue's We'll see that one again in five minutes. But wait, there's more. Hold on. Let's go back and look at this.

I want to show you something right here with this email. Let's open this email up. Did you notice at the top, I had categorized the email? Why does that matter? I'll show you can categorize your individual emails, it's as easy as right clicking on the email, and clicking on your categories right here. You can add categories, which are basically labels to your emails.

Why does that matter? Let me tell you why. I see a lot of people that are leaving stuff in their inbox for a very specific and crazy reason. They're afraid to put them away. They're afraid to put them in a folders over here, which we're going to talk about in just a little bit, because they're afraid they won't be able to find them later. And the reason they're afraid is because look, it only searches the folder you're actively in.

Oh really? Click on the search field outlook users and I'm going to show you the comparable in Gmail in just a minute. Click on the search field. Look what happened. The entire top header just changed currently folder, all subfolders all outlook items, all mailboxes by person by subject, did it have attachments? Who did I send it to?

By category. So what that means is that you could do in all sub folders, all outlook items, search by category. And every email you tagged in that category is going to come up on your screen, regardless of the folder it's in. Which means you don't have to be afraid to put your stuff away. I know sometimes it's touching multiple items, I don't know which folder I should put it in right now. Just pick a folder, the folder that makes no sense, but put the categories on it, or change the subject line for critical keywords, and then put your stuff away so you can find it later when you need to.

And we're going to talk about a very unique and different way to think about your file management in just a little bit. But this and by the way, if you're an outlook user, do you know that by using categories, you when you categorize your calendar items, it allows you to have a color coded calendar for different types of events, So play around with the categories. It's really cool. Now, wait a minute, though. So that's what I'm doing with my tasks in Microsoft Outlook from my emails. Let's go to G mail real quick for the Gmail users.

Now I want to show you some I'm gonna bring up my little task window over here on the side. And now I've got this email test email to show you how to do conversions. But watch this Gmail users, this is sort of new. I'm going to click and hold this email and drag it over here and look what that does drop to create new test, they've added drag and drop into this. Alright, and so now what's interesting, I think it might have put it up in the today column. Let's take a look.

Yeah, it's in here. So let's try this again. click drag, drop. There it is right here. And now what I can do is I can actually open it up to edit it just like I did in Microsoft Outlook, send PDF webinar. And, yeah, date and time.

I'll get that done tomorrow. Just like I did. Pre Obviously, and look at this, this is super cool. Take a look right here. You don't have to worry about seeing the text of the email. When you drag an email into tasks in Gmail.

It gives you a link back to the original email seen, just click the link and go right to the email. And that's really handy. If the email has attachments. You don't need to go searching for the attachments, you're just gonna click the link, you'll be right back the full email with the full attachments to take your action. It's pretty slick. By the way, a little side note, did you know that the person that developed the suite of Google products used to be the lead developer at Microsoft Outlook and office, same person.

That's why there's so many comparables. So that's pretty cool. Now wait, I want to show you an option to take a look at this. Watch this. You can also open up the email and on the top. Once again.

There's those darn three dots, three dots, add tasks. Oh, look at that add to calendar. Wait a minute. mean you can actually pop in here and create a calendar item? Oh, yes, you can send PDFs. I'm sorry about that I love sounds like my security team has just decided to go off.

But send PDFs time tomorrow, let's say tomorrow at 130. How long did that take? You know what I'd like to invite you to join me for the meeting in my home office. East Lansing, Michigan on that day, that's how you can add a calendar item from an item here out of your email. No, I'm not going to save that. Yes, I'm going to leave.

And wait wait, there's one more let's go back to here. Let's go back to my inbox. I'd like to get this Randy Dean into my contact database. If you just put your mouse over the sender's name and leave it Gmail users Look at this. It'll have Add To Cart tacks right here. Let's go back and see if I have an email.

Let's see lead seek. I'm gonna, right here, see how it says add to contacts right there. Or option B, take a look at this. Open up the message. You have three dots up here, you also have three dots on the side. And right here, it's a block rival Dean.

But if they're not in your database, it will give you the option to add to contacts right there, too. Oh, wait a minute. So that means in Gmail, you can easily make your email into a task, you can easily make your email into a calendar item. And you can easily add this person to your Google Contacts. Hold on a second. Let's go back to my outlook.

Hmm, interesting. Left click, hold the click let's drag it to calendar and drop it. That opens up a brand new calendar item just like I did with the task and once again, sand PDFs. Well, that's you guys. time tomorrow and too, let's make it three location home office, East klancy. Boy, this is similar deja vu, and a Wait a second.

You know what I'd like to invite all of you from wherever you're at, to drop what you're doing catch the flight to Detroit to make the hour and 15 minute drive up here to my home office in East Lansing for the meeting tomorrow, three or I send you your PDFs. Even some Fancy seeing a little bit of snow, like this invite. See what that means I can do in 15 to 30 seconds, I can take an email that comes into me flip it into a calendar item for my calendar. Which I can then turn into a meeting request for my team members with the message text down here at the bottom so I can put my cover note right here. Hey everybody, look at this note we just received from one of our key vendors. We need to have a meeting about this first thing tomorrow.

That's a 15 to 30 seconds. Oh wait, are you on Office 365 come up here before you even hit send from Meeting requests for tomorrow. He click on scheduling assistant, and you can start typing in their names and emails right here to see if they're even available tomorrow at three. Cool. But wait, there's more. I'm not going to actually put this on my calendar because Sorry, my task list that would be redundant.

I got one more for you. I showed you how to change and add somebody into contacts in Gmail. Let's talk about adding this random guy into my contacts in Outlook so that way I never forget who I am. Left click hold to click drag and drop people drop it. That creates a brand new contact item based off of the email but look what it does. it populates name and it populates email, look at tags it's in the categories to pretty cool.

Hold on the email that caused me to create the contact is right here. Oh, wait, let me check. Yes, he's got a signature. Check this out. I'm going to grab that first. Let me get that job title.

Move it up there. Let me get that phone number right there. move that over here to the phone. And let me get that mobile number right there, move that over here to mobile, how long that take that type of letter. Did you notice I didn't even do a cut and paste right there, I just did an end, click drag over and move what watch close and click on the end of the text drag over until it's fully highlighted. Once it's fully highlighted, release the click, which allows you to then pick it up and move it wherever you'd like.

That's called an on click drag over and move. And once you master that little trick, it'll save you a couple seconds over a copy and paste or cut and paste every time. But wait a minute, that little trick I just showed you. That doesn't work in Microsoft Outlook that works in the entire Microsoft Office Suite, Word, Excel and PowerPoint. It'll also even work at Gmail and Google Docs and any of those tools. You can take a piece of text or data, highlight it, pick it up, move it from the wrong place to the right place, save me a couple seconds every time you do it, which means I just gave a couple people on this call at least a couple extra days this year.

So wait, why don't see it again. Okay, here you go. Click drag over till it's fully highlighter, release, click, then pick it up and move it wherever you would like. Oh, by the way, do you know about the triple click and windows, a little bonus tip for you here, single click, of course put your cursor wherever you put your mouse. Double click highlights the entire word that you're on, triple click entire paragraph or group that you're on. And of course, Ctrl A everything in the document.

Of course, that's in the wrong place. So what I'm going to do is grab that and move it back to where it was before. Let's see what happens when I hit save. Oh, we're gonna check the database to make sure we're not creating duplicates. This guy's already in there looks good. I'm just gonna cancel them and close.

You now see why my inbox is so clean and both my outlook and my Gmail. You may not realize it but I've given you a from this point forward for the rest of your professional career, email processing and efficiency management system. Let's go back to The handouts here and I'd like if you printed off the handouts jumped a couple slides ahead to this one right here. So you see this decision tree by the way, you want to know how you can get away with not having a real job for like 15 years, come up with a slide like this and go start sharing it with people. But here's the thing, I want you to take some notes. If you've got this printed out, I want you to take some notes.

First thing, if you're going to receive a new email, we've already talked about it right in the big letters right here, decide. You're gonna make a decision if you're going to open it. A couple minutes or less. You do it now right over here, Ohio. Remember Ohio, only handle it once. Don't save quick stuff for later.

Get it done. Now. If you don't have time to deal with the quick stuff, why are you checking your email longer than three minutes task list right below that or calendar and I'd like you to write in one more thing or trash. Just because somebody sends you something doesn't mean you necessarily have to do something with it. Now if it came directly from your boss Rijkaard what I just said, Okay, now, think about this. Now once you've got it done, or you got it on your taxes, or you got it on your calendar, do you need it in your inbox anymore?

I mean, are you probably not, then you've only got two options, file it or delete it. And remember, knowing that you have the ability to do search. And you have the ability to label and tag your items in both outlook and Gmail. Finally, you should be much more confident. You put in keywords, you can put in categories, you can label it in Gmail, and then you can search and find your stuff. Even if it's not in the folder you thought you put it in.

And if you don't have a good folder for it, make a folder, put it there. It's not rocket science. I'm gonna argue that's clearly not rocket science. It's just advanced common sense, what to say about common sense. Not all that common. But now do me a big favor.

If you've been writing this down, go up to the top of this slide and cross out those two words teaming email for me. cross them out and write in these three words instead, all office inputs, all office inputs, because there's a have to be just email you manage this way. Or could you also manage your voicemails snail mail documents, ie documents, faxes, text messages, stacks, piles and clutter using the same basic processing decision tree. I'm gonna argue you could do it for all of those items. So regardless of format, you get something new. If you touch it, look at it, listen to it, you make a decision.

If it's quick, you get it done and gone. And if it's not quick, it becomes a task item or a calendar item. Then you either put it away or you throw it away. See how that will knock down the stacks, piles and clutter on your desk and keep the quick stuff moving and help you be more focused on your more important stuff via your task list and calendar. Stop marking them unread. Stop flagging them stop starring them do this instead.

Give it a like three weeks to a month. Try it. You won't Go back. And if you can't keep up, that might indicate that maybe email is the symptom of a bigger problem. All right. Remember, when you're fighting fire, you do something different.

Now, with where we're at, I have a wait a second, though, I almost forgot. Let's go back for the Gmail users real quick. I want to show you something. Search mail, search all now. But hold on a second. Wait a minute.

Did you see this little arrow? Whenever you see little things like that, click on it because it opens up a whole big search manager from two subject words doesn't have it cetera size mail has attachments, etc. And you can even come in here and create a filter to search for all messages by that party. Cool. Once again, you've got advanced search capabilities, which means And if you add that in that you've got labels and you can put it in multiple labels, you can find your stuff. Now by the way, right now you're probably if you're a gmail user or if you're an outlook user looking at these labels you're gonna wait a minute, Randy, how are these different from folders?

Wait a minute Anna soccer automated messages speaker match. And a soccer automated messages speaker match. They're not they're the same. labels in Gmail are the same as folders. The anything you label, if you archive it goes into that folder. But wait, listen to this.

This is genius. What they did is they combined fullerene with categories like I showed you Now look, I had to sit and stare at this for like 2030 minutes. The first time I was playing around with these labels before I realize it's genius. I wish outlook would move to this model. Let me explain to you why is genius. You could label it in all three of these These folders, and then hit Apply.

Now watch, it adds the labels right here. And now if I were to come over and hit archive, it leaves the inbox. But I could go to any of these three folders and find that email. It's going to be in all three folders. See how genius that is? Now to turn off a label, you just simply click on the little X's.

Pretty cool. All right. Yeah, that'd be nice. That'd be combining categories with labels. I wonder if outlooks gonna actually mimic Gmail on this. It's pretty clever.

Now, I want to this might potentially for a couple people, on today's call, be the biggest time saver you're going to get today. I want to lift this up one level further. I'm going to do a zoom in a flip right now. No, I'm not going to actually do it in person, you'd hear a big crash in the background and then probably yell for 911. What I'm going to do instead is this zoom into this box right here. A couple minutes or less Let's do it now.

And up to this point I said not just email, anything you received that you give your attention to you realize you can take a couple of minutes or less, do it now. So it keeps moving, don't get let it get stuck at your desk. Um, but wouldn't it be nice if I could flip this box over? So it doesn't just help me with stuff coming in. But it might also speed up some of the stuff I'm sending out. For instance, how many of you have ever been typing a message you've been typing in for a few minutes, you're about ready to hit send you saved yourself.

There's some good, right? There's some mistakes business composition right there. Then you say to yourself, but you know what, I've answered this question before and I'm gonna answer the same darn thing again. Same darn thing keeps popping up over and over again. So where to most of you go to find it so you don't have to retype it. I know where you're going.

You're going to your sent folder. And you think I am so smart. It's only going to take me three to five minutes to find the last time I sent that thing that's reasonably smart. Some of you that are using smarter outlook users. You go No, Randy soon as I send one I might need to send again later, I immediately opened my sent folder. Because it's right at the top, I just sent it.

And then I pick it up and move it out of my sent folder, put it in my graphs folder. Wait, I would do that. I can tell you I'll show you why. Let's pop in Outlook users. Take a look at this. So first, let's look at your sent folder.

My sent folder looks like a lot of your inboxes Yep, sure does. Good luck finding something fast in here. Hold on. Notice my drafts folder. It's got a total of 12 items in just 12. So I'm going to click on this now notice this is what these are.

These are templates. Watch what I can do right here. I'm going to take this one. Speaking in Central Florida. I just got done speaking there yesterday, but I saved this email in my drafts folder. I moved it from sent to drafts.

So I could do this watch for work. And now that I'm going to forward it, I'm going to do this actually this is really interesting. I'm going to be speaking in Central Florida again, feel sorry for me on 221 Okay, so on February 21. Now watch what I'm gonna do. I'm going to come down here. I'm going to pull out that information and I actually do I'll make this a pop up so you can see it a little bit better.

What I did is I just took out the little forwarding header which was like you know, you see I cleared that text out to make this cleaner. Now of course I got to clean this up. I will be speaking again in Central Florida on 221. If your team has an interest, I can do something on to plenty. Right and wait up here Did you see I got rid of that little RV. Make sure you that when you're about to forward something.

You get rid of that RV or Fw because that basically tells the other party you mean nothing to me. So get those up, but you see what I've got now here's the beauty of this look. The attachments Right there, I don't have to go find him again. And this is what I do when I'm trying to reuse an email that has attachments. I just take a previously sent version. That's basically the format I need.

I drag it out of my sent box into my drafts folder, just so I can find it fast. And then I use the forward option. See, I got challenged on this lady goes, really how can you keep reuse a draft. Once you send a draft, it's gone. I'm not reusing a draft, I'm forwarding an already sent message. And by doing that, I can use it over and over and over again.

I just got to clean it up a little bit every time and I can save my time and have my attachments right there. It's easy. That's what I'm doing for attachments. By the way, if you're a gmail user, that won't work. Sorry. Get this Gmail will not allow you to move a sent item back into your drive.

Folder. And when you think about it makes some sense. How can it be a draft, it's already been sent. I worked, here's my workaround, I just created a label in Gmail called automated replies. And whenever I send a message that I believe could make a good template in the future with its attachments, I just tagged it with that label automated replies. And then I can go to my automated replies folder in Gmail to find my template style emails there and do the same basic process.

Okay, so this is what I'm doing for emails with attachments. But you probably think, wait, me and Randy, a lot of my emails don't have attachments. They've just got basic text, maybe a web link or two, maybe an image or two. Can I get one better? Why yes, you can. How many of you outlook users have a signature?

Very nice. I bet you almost all do. How many of you have more than three. But watch this. By the way, I will tell you that when I do my program, I tend to hang out in this inbox. Okay, but you don't have to be in your inbox, you just have to be anywhere in Outlook where you can see this button right here new email, I strongly believe that that button is the fastest path to get to your signatures tool.

So let's click on new email. And notice that when you open a new email in Microsoft Outlook under either the message tab or the Insert tab, there is a big button for signatures and let's see what I've got going on. Wait, wait, Whoa, look at all those. But if I come all the way down to the bottom, and I click on the word signatures, like I did with categories earlier, it opens up my signatures wizard, where I can now edit the signatures that I've already created over time to improve the quality of my outgoing communications over time, as well as make new signatures whenever I see the need for one. And you'll see I'm a tad bit crazy about my signatures tool, some would say certifiably so I say crazy like a fox because Look what I've done here I've got the same signature that you probably have.

Now notice you can now drop an image into your session. signature outlook users, I think it's this little widget right here or just a copy and paste of the image. And it doesn't have to be your face. You could use your snipping tool or your snipping sketch note down here sn IP, and allows you have two tools in Windows now that allow you to do screenshots. You could use either one of those to grab a screenshot little image of your logo off your website, drop it in, and you can have a logo in your website look all slick. So it doesn't have to be your face.

And then below that, I got my contact information, a little bit of shameless self promotion. And did you notice Did you notice right over here to the left, exact same signature, exact same signature? Because this is the signature that I've set up for all new messages, see that? So if I hit new email to that pops in and look at this, I'm looking at you twice right now on the screen. Isn't that fun? But let's say you and I have been trading emails.

Every time I hit reply, you get my face Get my contact information, get my online e learning tools get my social media channels you get my youtube channel you get annoyed, dude Seriously, why half a novel every time you hit reply? Take a look. This one right here Randy short reply, name tagline mobile website LinkedIn. That's the one I'm using for replies and forwards. I have a much more extensive signature for brand new messages, a much shorter signature for replies and forwards because that assumes we've already been talking. And oh, wait, get this.

Not only do I have these two signatures, I have all the rest. What are these? Let me tell you what these are for. This one's for replies and forwards. This one's for brand new messages. But I do 75 to 100 sessions on this topic and related topics all around the United States, Canada and even occasionally Europe every single year.

You know what that means? several times a week. I'm getting asked of how Question. Hey Randy, we started the conference event workshop. How do we get this to our people? Take a look at this signature right here.

Everyone info request. Ah, oh, oh, I see that. I've seen people do that before. That's not even over the top. That's just plain rude. That's just rude.

Having a signature that long. It's not a signature. It's an automated response letter sales letter even watch this cancel, go up to signature come down to info request click on that that overwrites and replaces the previous signature. Now I'm going to grab that top line and do that and click drag over and move that way. I don't have to think of subject lines. And let's personalize this thing dear Myra, how long did that take?

If the word signature out of your head replace it with automated response tool. Oh, by the way, since we're in the Compose view, I wanted to show you a couple little buttons they've added recently. This works just like using the microphone on your phone. Watch this. Hi, Myra. hope your day is going very well.

It spell your name right. But hey, exclamation point. Oh, who just got excited right there. Period. That one didn't work I tried. But ideas.

Alright, so I'm going to turn off the dictate. And then I want to also show you this. You can also build templates. And what these are, these are templates that allow you to basically create more formatted messages than something like this right here. Because what that does is like if you've got artwork or design, you could do some fancy stuff. All right, wait, there's more.

Did you know that Microsoft Outlook has effectively built what's a micro version of signatures that you can use in conjunction with your signatures, as well as with emails you're actively currently typing? But let me explain. You know what else I get asked 75 200 times a year. Hey, Randy, what do you need? When you come to our event, so that we can hook up your computer to see your stuff on our screen, take a look at it. So I'm going to put my cursor inside of here to right here.

Alright, so I just put it right there. And now what I'm going to do in this open emails I'm going to open the Insert tab outlook users come over here to the right to quick parts, open up quick parts and hit Avi needs. Oh, I have a standard PC laptop they can hook into a projector using their standard Avi and or HDMI, I need power service the Peters well, small table blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I've never met them ever again. Because I made it a quick part. How do you add something to quick parts once you've typed a little blurb that you think would make a good quick part, simply highlight it once it's highlighted.

See the first time uses it might all be grayed out because you don't have anything in there. But once you have something highlighted it'll allow Save Selection to gallery to pop up. And then you just give it a name. Hit OK becomes part of your drop down. And this is really good for those little blurbs you find yourself typing over FAQ. Your office, stuff like that.

And the thing about the combination of signatures, quick parts templates in your grasp folder with attachments, you can automate all of your outgoing stuff and really speed it up. And here's the beauty of that. Think about this. Does that mean a whole bunch more your work fits that box right there? I think it does. Now I'm looking at time I saw a question popped up, I'm gonna do the QA on this at the end of the session, so I can get through a couple more really critical items before I run out of your time at 230.

Okay, I'm actually because I started two minutes late, I'm gonna probably run about two minutes, late 230 to 233. So I'm giving you a heads up on timing on this. Of course, you can jump offline whenever you need to, because remember, I'm going to get you access to the replay after the session too. So um, but here's the thing, I got to go and talk about Gmail. Hold on a second, Randy. problem as a gmail user, and it is it is a problem.

Take a look if you go into settings in Gmail. All right. Under the General tab, you page down, you get one signature. That's it. You also get one out of office. That's all you got.

Omer. So that trick doesn't work. By the way. Look, there's my label automated messages I mentioned earlier on. By the way, while I'm in here, come in here, check out your settings. And I would recommend as a gmail user go through every single one of these drop down tabs to see what's in there, because there's some goodies in here that you might really enjoy.

You know, but one thing I want to show you right here, notice this, you want to greatly reduce your distraction. Turn on so that only important mail items notify you we'll talk about that more in a little bit. And the other thing that I wanted to show you this if you're a heavy Gmail user, take a look at this keyboard shortcuts. Learn more. Take a look at this Gmail users. They've got shortcuts that you can use on your computer on an Android device or an iPhone.

Phone and iPad, and the related to all these different areas. And notice this like what you can do what that means you don't have to move your mouse to do something, you just use the keys on your keypad. I'll tell you what I do if I was like heavy primary Gmail, user and workplace, I'd be printing that page onto a sheet of paper and I'd be highlighting two or three of those and working on them until I have mastered. Then once you have those mastered, cross them out, highlight a couple three more until you got this list mastered and then jump down and do the same thing with this list. Six months you'll be like a Maestro, people come watch you do email. But that's not what I wanted to show you.

Here's what I wanted to show you. Come over here to your advanced tab Gmail users. And inside of here, notice they've got now in your handouts. It's called canned responses, but they just recently changed the name to templates. So in your handouts, cross out where it says canned responses on that one slide and change it to templates under the Advanced tab and they That. Notice there's some other cool little goodies in here that you might want to be interested in.

But templates turn on because once you have this setup, watch this Gmail users, I'm going to click on compose. I'm going to come down here once again to the three dots, open it up templates, insert, standard info request, boom. That's the same. You can make multiple signatures like I did, and outlook in Gmail, using your canned responses. Wow. Alright.

Now what I want to do because of where we're at on time, I want to mention to you I told you, I was going to talk about file cabinets, but you know what, I've got a little tool I've built here. It's called my YouTube channel. Let me tell you what's in my YouTube channel. I built three videos right before the holidays last year, so they're only about a year old. They still are fully relevant. I want you to hear the three videos that I created.

Video number one, how do you design your phone? Do you do sophisticated drop down structures with subfolders? And even folders inside of folders? Or do you instead just have a really simple folder structure with just a couple of folders, and then you search and sort with your keywords or your categories, your labels to find your stuff? Guess what? I don't care.

And I talked about in that video your options there. And I'll give you the pros and cons of each. there's pros and cons. Either way, you can figure out which way works works best. All I do care is that you don't leave stuff in your inbox because the statistics have shown the vast majority of people that leave items in their inbox that they have dealt with either getting it done or adding it to a calendar task list. You're remarkably likely to open it up and read it again later because can't remember if you did or not.

And if you're doing that you need to get them out of your inbox into a folder. You could have three folders Active archive delete, or you could have a whole set of folders, that's your choice. Although I do like the argument that you could have a simpler structure now, if you change the text on your message, and or you use your search field search field strategically. video number two, how do you clean up a really messy inbox quickly and efficiently using the inside tools of both outlook and Gmail? And in that video, I talked about how you can do this thing called sorting in Microsoft Outlook. Boy, I'd like to see all messages.

Let's find somebody here that might have a message to let's see, LC W. Yeah, there's a couple of ci all the messages that are similar, or by how about this interested? Let's do that. See, there's all the emails with the same subject line, or emails with a really big attachment. See that? That's called sorting. And I talked about how you can use that as a way to find stuff.

I So, in that talk about how you can then create groups and move groups of messages out and doing similar thing inside of your Gmail utilizing this tool called filters. Okay. We're going to talk about the filters in Gmail a little bit more in just a minute because it can hopefully help you greatly reduce your distractions to video number three, how do you do the same thing with all the paper and clutter on your desk and in your office, and I walk you through a step by step process on that. Now all three of those videos are about 15 minutes each. I will give you the links to all three of those videos after the session as part of my follow up mail out to you, and I will post them on the replays link, because if you want to deep dive any of those topics, how do I structure my folders?

How do I clean up my messy inbox? How do I, um, you know, clean up my desk and office. Any of those, you're going to have a step by step process, and I'll tell you what I do I recommend Can you do it? I do with all my little YouTube tutorial videos, I go on YouTube all the time to find out. How do you change the headlight on a Chevy Equinox? Or how do you reset your garage or card code?

As you're playing that video, just play it until you see what you need to do next and hit pause, do it, try it, then start playing it again. You can do that with me on YouTube about that. Pretty fun. Now wait, though I got 1222 more big tips, two more big tips. And I'm going to do it in 10 minutes because it's 223. So here's your two more big tips.

Remember, I'm going to stick around a little bit after to do any q&a. Okay, so I've got a little bit of time if you got some q&a that's queued up, but I got two more big tips. Randy, one other thing you're doing. All right. It's called blinging. What's bling?

Notice I put into squirrel. What's bling? It's nothing to do with modern contemporary hip hop culture. Here's what it means. It's a little sound that your computer or your phone makes when something new Consider buckling. And you'll see people just drop everything to go look at their screen.

Oh my gosh. It's like an addiction. It is a squirrel and it's chasing you. And by the way, listen to the ugly statistic about this, this is scary. The average I got this by the way from yoga journal, my wife is a subscriber, but it was also covered by a couple of the major news networks. Scientists believe that incessantly checking your email, voicemail and text messages throughout the workday leads to significant short term IQ loss.

A recent study by the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London found that working professionals that were constantly checking their email, voicemail and text messages in real time throughout the day, suffered a 10 point drop to their short term IQ. To put that in some perspective, that's roughly the same drop you'd have if you're missing an entire night's sleep and more than doubled the four point drop you'd have from smoking marijuana. No joke, it makes you more than twice as dumb as a pot smoker. My gosh. And wait it gets even better scientists believe that men suffer worse than women as men are not quite as good at multitasking. So gentlemen, we get even dumber and the women know it hey you want to miss a Randy just send him an email and text him at the exact same time Steve will come right out of his ears.

Um, but there is some sense to why you're doing this because in your email, voice and text sometimes you're getting really important urgent items sometimes really important people. But is that the majority of the items you're receiving in those tools are the minority for most people. It's a small minority that are critically urgent and or from highly important people. So you're looking all the time to see if it's one of those really important or urgent things. Most of the time it's not and you're making yourself dumb when you do it. Maybe see a problem there.

Hmm, you know, Outlook and Gmail can both help you. Watch this. First let's go to Outlook. I'd like to really know when this Randy Dean guy sends me a message. Watch this, I'm going to do a right click on the message, you get a whole series of options. You got the copy, which means you can put it in more than one folder, reply forward, just stop using refile.

Just stop it. By the way, you want to stop the pile. It's really easy. Listen to this, all you have to do is this. You want to send out a message to a large group of people. You don't want everybody hitting reply all.

Put your name and email in the To field, put everyone else's name and email in the BCC field. Then when somebody tries to hit Reply All it only goes back to the names in the two or the CC field, not everybody in the distribution list. And if you want to be really snarky, don't put your name and email to field put your favorite coworkers name and email to field. That's funny. Okay, look at this unread and flag but you're not going to use that anymore because you're going to do a tasking calendar instead. Here's where you can categorize your emails find related all messages in the conversation that's based off subject line all messages from sender by the person and look at this, we categorize the message you can find out All emails with those same categories very cool.

I have a YouTube video which is about quick steps, which is in the rules video I have on my YouTube channel I'll add that one to my list because we're going to talk about rules very briefly here in just a second and look at this one ignore you know what this one's for. This is the bomb calm. You ever get that email where somebody says hey everybody buddy's birthday today make sure you wish Betty a happy birthday. So you send your little reply to Betty Betty hope you have the most wonderful of days eat some cake for me send and then you spend the rest of your day knocking everybody else's reply to that same same message into your trashcan. After you send your reply to Betty, right click on the original message Mark ignore then every other reply will automatically go into your trash can.

Boo. Yeah, big time saver. There goes some squirrels. All right. But wait. That's not the tip.

Here's the tip. I want to know when this random guy sends me a message. Right click, come down to rules create rule brings up Rule manager Now watch this, if it's from Randy Dean, and only when it's from Randy Dean, I'd like to have a pop up on my screen as well as play a unique sound Wait, what? See that's when those notify bubbling. There. There's the blame.

You've been here for years, you go browse your computer. And what I want you to do is browse for a dot WAV sound file dot w Avi, search all files, and you should get a little sample icon might look like a speaker when you do that search. If you're using Windows Explorer, you can sample the different sounds right there and then just figure out what sound you want to install. And if you have a recorder, you can make your own. Oh is it as a dot WAV output, Dom, da da da. And then you see what that means.

You just have a special ringtone for that person's email just like you can do on your phone. Make it so that that person's emails pops and it doesn't have to be by person. Look at this. Turn it off. Let's go to Advanced you can do it by what's in the subject line. You can do it by whether the email As Mark high importance, you can do it by whether there's words in the header, or address meaning you can make all emails from a particular company pop, or wait, next, automatically delete or automatically file.

Okay, now, like I said, I'm getting low on time. I have a YouTube video on this too, that talks about rules and the related thing called quick steps, which basically means you're making push buttons to do things. So I will send you the link to that video too, at the end of today's program, so you can take this as deep as you want. But the key point is identify who your most important people are. Make those ones pop with some sort of special pop up or sounder. Gmail users, you do something a little bit different.

You come into your settings and you go to filters and here's what I want you to do. Now watch this as a two step, create a new filter I'd like to get I'd like to see all emails from this Randy Dean guy. Create filter. Now watch the bad I just brought up all emails Randy Dean but I still have this cover screen. Watch this. Always Mark important create filter.

Now when I do that, I just told Gmail that this Randy Dean guy, his messages are really important. Now, I want to remind you something. Let's go back to the General tab in settings ah down a little bit. Important mail on. Gmail is going to let me know when I get a message from this party, because it's an important message. The whole goal here is to reduce your distraction, but yet still be able to know when your most important clients, customers, vendors, coworkers are trying to get in touch with you quickly.

And if you can set this up, that means you don't have to look all the time at every message, but you can certainly look quickly at the more important messages. And then here's what I want you to do with everything else get on a time based regimen. Okay? Check it out set points throughout the day you determine the set points you Know how often you need to be checking your email. If you're a heavy client Customer service is going to be shorter you might still be checking every 15 to 30 minutes. If you are more project based and you need to have longer time of focus to get your deeper project work done 45 minutes 60 minutes 90 minutes you set that but whenever you go check your email on your regular routine you revert back to this if it's quick you do it now if it's not quick you put it on your task list or calendar once donor task file or delete no place to file make a place to file put it there.

So that means several times a day you're running your inbox down to close to zero. All right. Quick stuffs done and gone longer stuff on your test center callin Now assuming you just ran your inbox down to zero. While you're at it, why not check your voicemail snail mail documents, the documents etc all your other input streams do the same thing to them to running down zero several times a day quick stuffs done and gone. Let's say there's nothing on your calendar where you go to figure out what you need to work on next. That's right, you go to your task list.

And if you get the first task done, it's still not quite time to go check your email again, then you do the next task. It's still not quite time next task. Here's how you're working your day, assuming there's nothing on your calendar and you've got your inbox script, task, task, task, email, tasks, tasks, tasks, email, on and off throughout the day, balancing your critical needs to get your focus work done with your needs to periodically get back to people. Unless you hear Dom da da da. You could check that one now. Doesn't that sound better?

You know what I'm seeing a whole lot of people doing almost the exact opposite. Here's what they're doing. Email, email, email, task, email, Facebook, email, task, email, text message Facebook task. Why am I so distracted by my not getting anything done? Because your inbox input and frankly squirrel focused, how about changing to be project client customer focused and trying this for a little bit of time. Okay, I'm out of time.

Last little thing. last little thing, though, how many of you are getting some spam? Okay, if you're getting spam tip, spam message comes in, here's what I want you to do, don't just delete it, hold down the shift key and hit Delete outlook users, because if you hold down the shift key and hit delete, it bypasses your deleted items folder, it's gone. Now, by the way, if same person over and over again, you could set up a rule to automatically delete the messages from that person in the future. If you're a gmail user, here's what to do. You just come into your inbox and click on the check box and hit the stop sign.

Let me tell you what that means. If you're a gmail user, Gmail, Google is learning from you and all the other users and if they see the same messages are getting flagged as spam. In the future, those messages will come right into your spam folder. Cool. I'm out of time did I promise give you way too much. Well, remember, I'm going to get you some even more information coming first.

Last little tip, by the way, could you try maybe checking your calendar and task list at the start of the day before you look at your email. Just a quick little final tip, I told you I gave you too much. What I recommend you do is use the ones that work best, find the tools that will work best for you. And look at the bonus materials, I'll send you to take this even further, there's going to be quite a bit there about you know, email etiquette, how to use these tools a little bit more deeply. And I'm also going to get you those YouTube videos. And remember, this is just one of several programs that I lead.

So keeping in mind for your events next year, um, you know, and I will be announcing the programs after the first year on both optimizing your outlook and time management and cloud using Gmail and Google those will be the next ones that I'm planning to do. I'm also planning to do my smartphone success and terrific tablets early next year. So watch for the announcements on those. And with that, I'm gonna say we are done with the formal program. I am going to now shut off the recording but I'm going to then also dive in and look at the q&a. So if you have questions, you can