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Graduate Student: Productivity and Organization

Email

Email is a regular part of academic life at McMaster and can be overwhelming. Managing and organizing your email will help you limit your time and stress, and both Outlook and Google have built-in feature to help you stay on top of your inbox and use it to your advantage.. 

Outlook

Outlook includes several features to help your organize your email.

  1. Flags - use the flagging feature to bring attention to items that require follow up and to create a to-do list within Outlook
  2. Folders - create folders and sub-folders for different projects, courses, and organizations and file all emails that do not need follow up into the proper folder
  3. Rules - set up rules for emails you receive regularly that automatically file them into the proper folder
  4. Assign Policy - set emails to expire and delete automatically after a period of time
  5. Categorize - use color codes to clearly label and identify emails

Gmail

Gmail provides similar features to Outlook with slightly different names and functions.

  1. Mark as Important - Like flagging, this tells Gmail that the content of the email is important and should be prioritized in your inbox. Emailed that are marked as important are collected in a separate folder
  2. Star - Similar to flagging, using the Star feature indicates an email that needs to be follow up on, and these emails are collected in a separate folder
  3. Tags - Tags work like folders and can be used to group similar emails into categories
  4. Add to tasks - Create a to-do list base don items in your email
  5. Snooze - Hides the email for a certain period of your time and reappears in the inbox after the snooze time expires

 

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