Friday, December 30, 2005


 

Total Workday Control - Giveaway Contest

I’m giving away 2 copies of Michael Linenberger’s book “Total Workday Control – Using Microsoft Outlook”. The contest will be open for until Jan 6. I’ll announce the winner on January 9.

Share your best Outlook productivity tip. I’ll pick two winners and give them each a copy of Michael’s book.


Comments:
btw - when you leave an entry, be sure to leave your email address so I can contact you if you win.
 
The best Outlook productivity tip for a TabletPC user? I would have to sum that up by saying only the following: TEO.

-Illuminator
 
My best productivity booster for Outlook is very simply and very powerful:

Turn off the automatic send/receive of email. Turn off all desktop email notifications.

The productivity enhancement comes from not being distracted every five minutes by incoming email. Simple and free
 
I love being able to drag and drop an email onto the calendar to make a new appointment, tasks to create a new task, contacts to make a new contact, or notes/journal to make a new entry there with all of the email content there.

Steve
s dot beller at ans-medical dot com
 
Ooops. Didn't leave my email address. singfiel (at) concentric.net
 
Simplify email reference and archiving:

Don't go overboard trying to construct a complex hierarchy of folders for saving messages you want to keep, then spending a lot of time to file each message into the correct folder by topic. This significantly increases the number of places that something _isn't_ when you go to look for it later.

Instead, simply create a separate .pst file for each calendar year (e.g. 2005.pst). Create a very simple hierarchy (perhaps just a single Reference folder) into which to drag messages you want to keep. Change the AutoArchive settings for your Sent Items and Deleted Items folders to archive into this file, and you'll automatically get a dated archive of your sent and deleted mail also.

Then when you want to find something, either sort the Reference or Sent Items folder by recipient or by sender, and/or use search tools to find a keyword in the appropriate folder. More often than not, you'll find what you're looking for with a minimum of fuss.

At the end of the year, burn a copy of the .pst file to CD for archiving.

(andy at tabletdev dot com)
 
Create custom views for focus

It's easy to get overwhelmed with information in Outlook. In particular, the Tasks facility in Outlook is quite powerful, and it's easy to end up with paralyzingly-long lists of To Do items.

Create custom views to cut away everything but what you want to focus on at the moment. Go to View | Arrange By | Define Views for some powerful filtering that you can use to define exactly what you're interested in working with.

You might create views to filter tasks based on context (a David Allen "Getting Things Done" concept), or filter emails except those from your team, or show projects that are due in the next two weeks.

(andy at tabletdev dot com)
 
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