The Outlook Inbox Workflow: Audit, Decide, Automate
A free 45-minute session on setting Outlook up so your inbox sorts itself, and a briefing is waiting for you every Monday morning.
- Free
- Live in Microsoft Teams
- Recorded for every registrant
22 October
It’s Monday morning, 8:40. You open Outlook. 40 things came in over the weekend and you’re looking at 6, because the rest sorted themselves while you were away. At the top there’s a short briefing: who’s waiting on you, what moved, what’s gone quiet. You read it in 2 minutes. 3 things actually need you. You’re done before 9.
That is what this session sets up.
According to Microsoft’s own estimates, the average person now receives around 117 emails and 153 Teams messages a day: roughly 270 items arriving before a single meeting is booked. Most advice on this concerns behavior: check less often, reply faster, aim for zero. This session covers configuration instead. What you set up once inside Outlook, and which parts of it Copilot can carry.
What the session covers
Audit
What is actually in an inbox: how much is a task rather than an FYI, how much is logistics rather than work only you can do, and which projects and people are taking the time. The audit produces a number, and you leave knowing how to produce yours.
Decide
A rule for what happens to each message on arrival, so the inbox sorts itself rather than waiting for you. Built from what your own audit shows rather than from a template, and configured with Copilot rather than by hand.
Automate
A workflow that runs on a schedule, reads the inbox before you open your laptop, and produces the Monday morning briefing above.
The session also covers what to watch for. Copilot has real limits with email, and working around them is part of the setup rather than an afterthought.
Why this session is built this way
Most Copilot training takes the form of a feature tour. Attendees see what the tool can do, leave impressed, and 2 weeks later are working exactly as before. This is the most consistently documented failure pattern in Copilot adoption research: people try something once, get a mediocre result, and return to what they know, because a feature with nowhere to sit does not survive a busy week.
A workflow is what holds it in place. The audit establishes what the inbox contains. The rules determine what happens to each item. Automation comes last, once there is something worth automating.
The features are the same ones covered anywhere else. What changes is that they have somewhere to live.
What to expect
45 minutes, starting on time.
Approximately 30 minutes of walkthrough followed by questions.
Live, in the product.
Everything is shown in Microsoft 365 as it behaves in practice, including where it is slower or more limited than expected.
One workflow, covered in full.
This session goes deep on a single subject rather than surveying the landscape.
Recorded and distributed to everyone who registers,
whether or not they attend.
Who this session is for
Operations and delivery leaders in organizations running Microsoft 365: people responsible for work that others depend on, with more incoming than the day can absorb.
The session works in Outlook, Teams and the wider Microsoft 365 environment. Some steps require the paid Copilot add-on and some do not; this is stated as it comes up.
Save your seat
Free, live in Microsoft Teams, recorded for every registrant.
Bringing this into your organization
The webinars demonstrate the workflow. Where teams want it built in their own tenant, with their own mail, systems and processes, Aivelli runs paid workshops covering the setup end to end.