Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 17. Top Ten Outlook Productivity Techniques

To help you in your quest to make Outlook a key component in your achieving peak personal productivity, in this chapter, I've brought together my top ten techniques for using Outlook as a full personal information manager.

As you go through these ten techniques, keep in mind that not all of them may apply to your particular work situation and the challenges you face. However, whenever you do come upon a technique that seems to fit, I urge you to implement it in your use of Outlook, using the detailed information referenced to in the text.

Utilize Every Single Bit of Outlook

The only way you can hope to have Outlook truly help you in your goal of achieving peak personal productivity is by making full use of the program's capabilities. This means being able to put Outlook to its best use in communicating with your co-workers and clients, organizing your ideas and supporting materials, prioritizing your tasks, planning your schedule, and evaluating your prowess in the area of time management.

One way to initiate this process is by expanding your Outlook horizons beyond e-mail in the Mail module. You can do this by getting an overview of the capabilities of Outlook's various modules and by learning the shortcut keys as outlined in Chapter 5 and then, perhaps, by making Outlook Today or the Calendar module the new center of your Outlook productivity system, as outlined in Chapter 6.

Organize Your Inbox

Like the paper inbox you may keep on ...