Improve productivity with quick and easy Outlook tricks

Your calendar is clogged with back to back meetings, your inbox has 500 new messages and it’s only Monday. You’re not alone! Email overload is a common problem for us all but it doesn’t have to be for you any longer. With a few simple tips and tricks you will not only take back control you will also dramatically increase your productivity. In Outlook it’s the little things that count.

Calendar tricks:
Click and drag:
Outlook makes it very easy to create an appointment or a meeting from emails, notes, task, and contacts or even file attachments. With your inbox open to a list view left click and drag any email to the calendar listing in your navigation pane. Outlook creates an appointment for you that include your email fully populated in the note section of the newly created appointment. All that is left to do is to modify your start and end time or if this is a meeting request, add the attendees.

Start time phrases:
When modifying the “Start time” or “End time” section of your appointment/meeting try typing in a word or phrases such as “tomorrow”, “next week” or “in three days”. You find that just about any phrase works well to give you the date you’re looking for. You can also type holidays like Christmas Eve or just a single numerical date reference to select that day in the current month. Play around with this to get a better feel for acceptable phrases.

Multiple day views:
When viewing your calendar you can hit the “Alt” key combined with the numerical keys 1 through 0 on your keyboard to see up to ten consecutive days in any calendar view.

Automatic formatting for your calendar:
If you’re a fan of the 31-day month view but have a hard time prioritizing your up coming appointments/meetings then using automatic formatting is for you. The automatic formatting will add colored labels to your month view.

To use this feature

• Click on “Calendar Coloring” from your “Standard” toolbar and click on “Automatic Formatting”.
  It is here that you can rename your formatting rule, select the label coloring and logical conditions that will apply the selected label to your appointment/meeting.
• Click on the “Condition” button to identify what conditions Outlook should filter by. Usually entering a common in the “Search for the word(s):” or the “Organized By” fields will do the trick nicely but you can always click on the “More Choices” or “Advanced” tabs to add additional filters to your automatic formatting selections. When you’re all done, you will be able to see your most important meetings with just a glance

Email tips:

Reduce the number of new messages:
Your first goal is to reduce the amount of incoming e-mail. So cancel subscriptions to unwanted mailing lists. The messages become a nuisance if you don’t have time to read them.

Respond appropriately:
If an e-mail contains several different points, respond to each in separate messages. This may take longer at first. But, it will be easier to deal with each e-mail thread.

Take advantage of subject lines:
Subject lines should relate to the body of the e-mail. So be as descriptive as possible. Subject lines that say things like “question” or “hello” should be avoided. Recipients won’t know what the message is about. And it will be difficult for you to categorize responses.

Be disciplined:
Avoid the temptation to check your e-mail every few minutes. Check it every hour on the hour for important messages. If you can go longer, do so. Of course, this might not be feasible in some work environments.

Set time aside each morning and evening to process your inbox. When you’re done, it should be completely empty. File messages you need to keep. Set reminders for messages that require you to follow up.