Most professionals rely on Microsoft Outlook to communicate and stay organized. And, I think it’s fair to say that most of us have been overwhelmed with our ever-growing Inbox at least once (or perhaps once per day or once per hour!). The basics of sending and receiving mail, managing calendar appointments and contacts, and creating new tasks are fairly straight-forward and some people never venture beyond these basics in Outlook. If you want to make Outlook work better for you and eliminate some of the overwhelm you feel when you look at your Inbox, here are tips to try today.

  1. Use categories. You can categorize any message, appointment, contact, or task in Outlook to keep you organized at a glance. Categorize your contacts to help keep business and personal separate. Categorize your appointments so you can quickly see where you are spending your time. Outlook has some pre-defined categories to get you started, but you can change these and create many of your own to make this system work for you.
  2. “Do Not Send Before” feature. Have you ever received a message that says “follow-up with me on this in a few weeks”? Rather than leaving this message sitting in your Inbox, click reply, type your message, and then set the future date and time when you want this message sent. It will stay in your Outbox and then automatically send at the appointed time, allowing you to file the original message out of your Inbox today.
  3. Use rules for incoming messages. To cut down on clutter in your inbox, use rules to process some of your messages. If you subscribe to a blog and have new entries emailed to you, set up a rule to move them to a new folder that you review when you have time. If there are messages that you regularly forward to others, create a rule to do that automatically.
  4. “Replies sent to” feature. If you are sending a message that requires a response that other people must also receive, use the “replies sent to” feature. This ensures that when each recipient clicks on reply, all of the applicable addresses will automatically be in the “To” field, eliminating both the reliance on the recipient to remember to select “reply all” and the extra time you may need to spend on forwarding the replies.

These are the first four tips to help you start using Outlook more productively. Watch for the next four on Thursday.

[Image courtesy of  ilco]