Have you seen a productivity difference since you started using the first four tips? Great! Here are four more to keep you going:
- Select colors to highlight important senders. If you routinely keep dozens or hundreds of messages in your Inbox, use colors to highlight important senders (I’d also recommend cleaning it up to keep only a few messages, but that is a post for another time!).In your Inbox, click on “Tools” then “Organize”. You can use color to highlight messages from important senders so these stand out in your Inbox.
- Send calendar appointments. When scheduling a meeting with someone, do you put it in your Outlook calendar AND invite the other person to the meeting? If not, start doing this. Taking the extra seconds to add other people to the appointment will ensure the meeting is also in their calendar, eliminating wasted time over mis-communications or forgotten appointments.
- Click and drag. Eliminate copying and pasting and start clicking and dragging. Click and drag a message to Calendar to open a new calendar appointment that will contain the body of the message. Click and drag a message to Contacts to create a new contact card, pre-filled with the appropriate information. Click and drag a message to Tasks to get the information from the message into a task.
- Favorite folders. If there are folders that you routinely move messages to, add them to your Favorites to eliminate scrolling and clicking in the main panel to find it. You can arrange your Favorite folders in any order and have one-click access to the folder.
We hope these tips will help you improve your Outlook productivity. This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Outlook tips and tricks, and we’d love to hear how you use Outlook. What is the best tip you can share?
[Image courtesy of c-unie]