The Missing Chair

End “meeting time email tennis”

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The world may be digital but it’s still nice to connect with people and talk things through. This leads to “meeting time email tennis” especially when more than one person is involved, until we’ve agreed upon a meeting date and time that’s suitable for everyone.

This productivity frustration has led to a rise in Cloud services like Calendly https://calendly.com/ and Timely https://www.gettimely.com/  . Those services provide more than meeting bookings, but you might not be aware of two little smart meeting organisers that are accessed directly from your Inbox.

For Microsoft Office 365 only, FindTime is a free meeting poll app you add to Outlook for Web (in your browser) or your Microsoft Outlook software, from the Store icon. With FindTime, you invite people and select a few different dates and times that suit as suggestions for the meeting. The recipients receive an email and vote on what times they can make, what times they can’t make and what times they prefer. The polling aggregates to find the winning time slot, then schedules the appointment in everyone’s calendar for that time, sending you a notification. With FindTime, the recipients don’t have to be on Office 365 but the organiser does.

FindTime

Boomerang is another great alternative, with a version for Office 365 that’s currently free  and a Gmail version with four different plan levels (free to $49.99 USD/month) .  Boomerang lets you place an interactive snippet of your calendar into an email, showing times available that people can click on to confirm or give them a snippet view of your availability.  It also has some great email extensions, allowing you to schedule when an email is sent. For managing your Inbox, Boomerang also enables you to get a reminder about an email if you haven’t received a reply within a timeframe you set.

Boomerang

 

Start exploring these email integrations today and put an end to meeting time email tennis!

Tab overload!

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Have you ever opened all the things then not been able to find anything? Open enough tabs in your browser and the titles become unreadable. Windows 10 had a great application  ‘peek’ feature that gives you a better view of all your open tabs and allows you to click on the particular one you’re looking for.

To activate it, bring your mouse cursor down to the application icon showing on your Task Bar but don’t click. Application peek will give you a row of open tab ‘mini windows’ and you can click on the right one. This works in Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox and Edge. It also works for other applications (not just browsers) if you have multiple Word docs, Excel spreadsheets etc open.

peek

If you’ve ever accidentally closed a tab, bring it back immediately by pressing Ctrl+Shift+T on a PC or Command+Shift+T on a Mac. For the Mac Safari browser, you’ll need Command+Z. This saves you from hunting through your history looking at search result pages, madly trying to remember which one it was.

If your PC is really overwhelmed, clicking on the Task View icon on the Task Bar in Windows 10 (this guy: taskviewicon  ) will give you mini window icons on your screen for every application that you currently have open.

Happy tabbing!

Ignore your co-workers in Outlook

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Did you know that in Outlook (since version 2007), you can ignore people on purpose?! What’s even better, is that Outlook has automated the Ignoring for you!

In a small business, say someone is organising drinks next Friday night but you can’t go, because you’re going out of town for the weekend. You’re in the mailing group though, so you get to see everyone’s Reply All emails about where people want to eat, what time they will be there and whether they are bringing a partner.

Historically, you’d hit Delete on every message as it appeared in your Inbox, or you’d set up a Rule to handle this (if you could be bothered).

But now a simple right-click – Ignore does the trick.

The Ignore feature will monitor all emails that come in as a reply to the same subject line and will delete them for you (move them to your Deleted Items), without you seeing them. Note this doesn’t tell the sender that you’re not seeing their messages.

Want to be in on the conversation again? Go into Deleted Items, find an ignored message, right-click on it and choose Unignore.

This works on PC, Mac, OWA … Android/iOS app

If you’re at the smaller end of small business, this same feature can be handy for mailing lists where topics & replies are emailed to you. It helps you to filter out what’s not relevant right now, while still staying on the mailing list.

And if you’re doing the sending, bypass anyone’s Ignore feature by changing the subject line when you reply. That can be handy for alerting everyone to a change of plans like moving the social event to a different day.

So go ahead – have a play with the Ignore feature and gleefully tell your colleagues that you’re Ignoring them!

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