You’re hit with that sinking feeling—you forgot to reply to that urgent email. Out of panic, you sprint to your inbox to draft a response that you should sent days ago. It happens to the best of us, especially when your inbox is overflowing, and your task list piles high. To ensure I don’t give myself that scare anymore, I’ve added a few solutions in my workflow—some that involve automation—to make my workday easier and stress-free.

My professional goals for the year are improving time management and follow-through. To take control of what can be a monster of an inbox, I have devised a few ideas to manage my emails more effectively.
The ultimate goal is ‘inbox zero,’ or having zero items in my inbox. To do this, I create other folders to separate out emails. Whenever I receive a message, it goes into its respective folder, whether it be related to client work or a specific topic like Copilot. This allows me to sort out my emails so nothing important gets lost and it makes it easier to find information if I need to reference back to a message. One of the best parts of this method is that it clears out that dreaded notification telling me I have hundreds of unopened emails, which often leads me to procrastinate tackling my inbox. With this system, finding information is a breeze, making me feel more organized and in control.

It can be easy to forget about all the tasks assigned to you from the numerous emails you receive. That’s why I set up a Power Automate flow to create a Planner task with the information from that email if it is flagged. It has a due date of two days after the email is flagged.

For those unfamiliar with Microsoft Planner, it’s a work management tool that allows you to track tasks across Microsoft 365 apps in one platform. Our Development Team Lead, Corrie recently shared her top productivity tips with Planner.

Here’s how I set up this flow:

Those who do billable work can relate to the struggles of remembering to fill in time sheets. I’ve set up two Power Automates flows to remind my team to log time—the first is a weekly reminder on Friday afternoons, and the second sends a message on the last working day of the month to ensure their time is logged. I modified a Power Automate script posted by a contributor that calculated the end of the month and changed it from an email to display as a chatbot in a Microsoft Teams group chat with my team.

Here is my custom flow: I set the recurrence to once a week and then added the action to post the message in a group chat in Microsoft Teams.

If it wasn’t apparent already, I’m a huge fan of using Power Automate to optimize manual processes and streamline my processes. From automatically creating tasks from emails to sending reminders, these tips have helped me stay on top of my projects even during the busiest of times. Try using these flows and see how much more efficient you work!