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Take Control of E-mail

  • 项目

Today I decided to stop the madness. An email every few minutes and desktop alert + sound to go with it makes it to easy to lose focus on my task at hand and look at my inbox. While I loved this feature when Outlook came out, it's become my achilles heal of productivity. No more.

  1. Tools->Options
  2. Click E-mail Options...
  3. Click Advanced E-mail Options...
  4. Uncheck:
    1. Play a Sound
    2. Briefly change the mouse cursor
    3. Show an envelope in the notification area
    4. Display a New Mail Desktop Alert (default Inbox only)

I highly recommend reading The Tyranny of Email. Do email on your time.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2005
    Well done for realising email is almost entirely batchable.

    Jeez, you would have thought Microsoft taught people basic productivity skills...
  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2005

    What about simply shutting down Outlook for the next two hours?
  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2005
    I did the same a couple of weeks ago. Now I switch to Outlook when I want to process email. Very liberating. The problem is that everyone around me is still interrupt-driven, but I'm working on that...

    "The Tyranny of Email" (and its followup) has also been published by ChangeThis, as http://www.changethis.com/10.TyrannyOfEmail
  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2005
    Why not just configure the client to check for new emails every 60minutes or 120minutes?
  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2005
    Still there is no way that you can make Outlook start automatically when Windows starts and also minimize to the system tray.