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Minimize Interruptions: Adjust your email alert settings

Allow yourself to work undisturbed

I you are still using the default email alert settings, this might sound familiar to you: You are writing a Word document. Suddenly the subject of an incoming e-mail pops up in the lower right corner of your screen. Immediately, you change to Outlook to read the e-mail. In this e-mail, your boss asks you to do some task. So you start working on this right away. The requested little task is soon finished. You should return to Word, but you return to Outlook instead. New e-mails have been sent to you. You start reading them. But wait a sec…you didn’t already forget your original task, did you?

Incoming mails are constantly interrupting office work nowadays. When your thoughts are interrupted while working, it might take long to achieve a new ‘state of flow’. It might take half an hour, an hour, of even the rest of the day for you to get back to where you were.

The function of an e-mail program is to create the preconditions for communication. It is a useful tool, but be careful not to let it take control of you!

Make sure that you have control of it instead! This can be done very easily, with this correction in your email alert settings:

  1. Remove the alerts.
  2. Check and process your e-mails only about once an hour.

I do admit that not everybody is able to work like this. If you work for example in customer service or in another sector, in which quick responses are crucial, you will probably not be able to use this method.

But most of the people knowledge workers can. And I think this is the way it should be done!

And here is how you do it:

  1. Click on Tools->Options… on the tool menu
  2. Click on E-mail options
  3. Click on Advanced e-mail options
  4. Remove the alerts of incoming messages as demonstrated in the picture:

outlook-remove-alerts

  1. Accept the changes by clicking OK.

Now, all the best with your new and peaceful (but yet efficient!) work environment!

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