You’re Doing It Wrong: 5 Tips for Surviving the Modern Workplace Using Microsoft Office

9:00am—Monday morning—my inbox flooded over the weekend, I have 2 new team members starting this week and we have an intern taking on a new project. Dozens of customers have questions and dozens more stakeholders want updates on the projects we need to complete. By 9:30am, I feel like I’m at the base of a mountain with no gear, no food, and no energy.

Trust me, it doesn’t have to be that way. You can take the power back! Here are 5 of my favorite productivity enhancing, stress reducing, and life saving tips.

#1 - Prioritize Differently

If you are like the majority users, you start your work day reviewing email. Much of it­ is noise, and if you aren’t careful you can find the days happening to you—instead of you controlling your day, you get sucked into the whirlwind of just being busy.

To help me gain back the power, I don’t start my day in the inbox. I start by reviewing the meetings, projects, and tasks I need to accomplish for the day. Microsoft Outlook has a solution that’s been around for a long time too—it’s called Outlook Today. I boot my Outlook client directly to this screen. This way I choose what needs to get done.

While this helps with my vision for the day, I still need to spend a significant portion of my time triaging email. I’ve asked hundreds of people how they handle email, and I hear the same answers over and over. Here are the top three answers I hear, and why they are all wrong:

1. Method #1, “I review email from oldest to newest” – With this approach, you never seem get to the top, and urgent needs have to sit because you were busy being busy.
2. Method #2, “I review email newest to oldest” – Some messages get forced into a perpetual lobby getting passed by time and time again. Important emails may wait days or even weeks before you ever see them.
3. Method #3, “I scan all my unread by subject and sender and pick what deserves my attention” – This sounds good in theory, but you waste valuable time reviewing and if you get more than about 20 emails a day, you are likely to still miss critical information.

Outlook has a solution for this too: Search Folders.

Instead of manually searching for emails you think might be important, why don’t you let Outlook do the hard work for you? A Search Folder saves the most common searches you do like a virtual folder. Without moving the messages, it organizes them based off of your criteria. For example, I go through my email like this:

1. Emails marked Important
2. Emails from my most important clients
3. Emails from my boss
4. Emails from my team
5. Whatever is left over

Additionally, emails I’ve flagged for follow up have their own Search Folder so I don’t have to dig back through to find them again. This cuts through the clutter and adds structure to my triage saving me hours each week. Please—hold your applause to the end.

#2 - Use Vulcan Mind Melds via OneNote

Process improvement never seems to end. It can seem like we identify problems and brainstorm great solutions, only to see them fizzle and die as we get sucked into new projects or onboard new people. I’ve found that OneNote is a fantastic way to minimize evaporating mindshare. I sometimes joke that if I die, OneNote will be the way that my spirit will live on as a voice from the grave. I recommend you use it to ensure good ideas don’t get lost or forgotten.

Here are some suggested ideas for Notebooks in OneNote:

1. The personal business tracker notebook – Send your travel itineraries and receipts to OneNote, Sync your Outlook tasks with projects you need to complete, use the Office Lens app to capture whiteboards, paper documents and more all into OneNote. Even send news and business articles from the web to OneNote for future reading.
2. The team notebook – Stop having meeting notes sent via email. Let one version of the truth reign supreme! At BrainStorm, Inc., my team outlines our job roles in OneNote and all of the projects we are working on. If I got promoted, that knowledge stays with the role! It acts as a dynamic, living manual.
3. The family notebook - Track your responsibilities at home (grocery lists, honey-dews, etc.) or keep a journal.

#3 - Remove Barriers with the Cloud

Whether it’s collaborating with a team member remotely or accessing a file when you don’t have your work computer, we should be smart about where and how we store files. Stop saving information to your PC library and start putting it online. While we are at it, stop sending me attachments in my email! There are a host of great storage solutions online: OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, and iCloud are all well known in the consumer space. I prefer my OneDrive for Business account via Office 365 because I get 1 TB (that’s right, T…as in Terabyte) of free individual storage for my work (personal licenses of Office 365 include unlimited cloud storage). Not only that, this allows me to leverage Office Online for live co-authoring on the web with high fidelity (I don’t lose formatting and objects display properly).

Beyond that, you can do live co-authoring in the desktop clients of Word and PowerPoint. Who knew, right?

#4 - Connect in New Ways Instead of Email

Too much stuff happens in email that shouldn’t. Here are few tools you should leverage to reduce the noise:

1. Instant Messages – Don’t let questions about an email happen in email. You end up sending dozens of one line messages back and forth in a chaotic mess. Tools like Skype for Business integrate directly into your mail client so you can have those conversations via IM. When you start an IM from the contact in an email, it will make the subject of your IM be the same as the email and provide a link back to the conversation so they have instant context even before I ask my question.
   
2. Enterprise Social Networks – Stop with the CEO Update via email. Everyone wants to reply all so they can show off that they read it. Stop with the new hire updates and the birthday announcements! I don’t want hundreds of “Congrats!” messages (*angry eyes*). Stop discussing amazing ideas in living email threads I can’t keep track of! Tools like Yammer were invented to help the important—but not urgent—communication avoid disruption. Yammer has completely transformed the way we work at my company.

#5 – Never Stop Learning

Do you remember LaserDisc? Can you image if we never tried CDs, DVDs, Blu-Ray or Digital Streaming and you still did everything via those useless Frisbees? My guess is that  80-90% of your frustrations with technology already have solutions, but because we are creatures of habit, we avoid the hard task of change.

• “Almost everyone wants change as long as they don’t have to do anything differently”

  -Bolman and Deal

  
  

Start getting excited about technology and what it can do. Experiment, explore and test new ways of doing things. Likely even with the stuff you already use everyday!

There is always a better way of doing things. Remember, you don’t know what you don’t know.

About the Author: Todd Kirk is an end-user advocate and trainer from BrainStorm, Inc.