You send a meeting request to a large group in your company (e.g. in my case it would be an all-hands meeting) and you subsequently get flooded with a bunch of responses. With so much other email in your inbox, you don’t need this extra aggravation. Thankfully, there are a couple of simple things you can do.
1. Create the meeting and say you don’t care about responses
It’s slightly different for each version of Outlook. The screenshot below is from Outlook 2007. Simply create the meeting and make sure that ‘Request Responses’ in not checked. The default is usually for it to be checked.
2. Send the meeting, but have a rule that deletes acceptances but keeps refusals.
This is described in nice detail in a blog post by the Outlook team. I applied the instructions of the Outlook team but with a small variation. I was only interested in seeing the refusals or the tentative responses where a new time was proposed by an invitee. The same application forms described in that post are used to implement my logic.
Hope this helps with your email productivity efforts. Let me know if you have any other meeting request tips in Outlook.
