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We all want to spend less time dealing with email and meetings, but let’s be honest, a lot of our time is still taken up with meetings and emails. In this blog post, we will talk you through some tips and tricks that have saved us hours and made the experience of organizing and managing meetings much more enjoyable.
Schedule MS Outlook Meeting from an Email By Dragging it to the Calendar
We’ve talked about creating a meeting out of a Microsoft Teams chat before, but you can also create one out of an email.
To create a meeting with the contents of an email, all you need to do is drag and drop the email to the calendar icon on the bottom left of Microsoft Outlook and you will get a meeting automatically created. You won’t get the person who sent the email added as an attendee but you do get the title of the email as the title of the meeting and the whole email copied into the invite.
Another way to do this is to click on the meeting shortcut from any selected email in the ribbon. That will do the same thing:
You can also do this in Microsoft Outlook online, but with the option of adding an email as an event or a task that goes to the To-Do application:
Give Yourself Time Between Each Microsoft Outlook Meeting
If you are stuck in back-to-back meetings and you want some breathing room, you can set it up in Microsoft Outlook to automatically end meetings early. This gives you some options, such as giving you extra time to leave meeting rooms, helping you be on time for your next meeting, and not to mention keeping the meeting focused.
To do this go to Microsoft Outlook and click on File -> Options -> Calendar and look under calendar options:
From here select the ‘End appointments and meetings early’ options and you can choose the default of ending time for meetings less than an hour and longer than an hour.
After you have done this, you will still see your meeting option times in 30-minute blocks, but notice when you select an option it is actually shorter by whatever option you specified.
Remove Past Microsoft Outlook Meeting and Calendar Reminders
If you work across multiple machines, you will know the frustration associated with logging onto devices and seeing past calendar reminders appear. Luckily, you can stop this from happening.
Simply go to File -> Options -> Advanced -> Reminders and select the ‘Automatically dismiss reminders for past calendar events’ option.
Find Meeting Dates Using Natural Language
Scrolling through your calendar can be annoying, especially if you want to have a meeting with someone 6 weeks from now. Thankfully, Microsoft Outlook has a Go to Date feature that allows you to go directly to any date to make scheduling meetings that are a few weeks away a lot easier. What’s more, it also accepts some natural language terms to make it easier. To access this, go to your calendar and press [CTRL] + G to see the dialogue:
From here you can just type that into the date box and be taken there.
Press ok, and you will be taken straight to the right date in your calendar.
In terms of what phrases you can use, the following are supported:
- day
- week
- month
- year
- now
- before
- next
- after
- last
- this
- ago
- today
- yesterday
- tomorrow
- days of the week
So there you go! Hopefully, this makes your life dealing with meetings in Outlook a little easier.
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