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Great Ways to Get & Stay Organized in Outlook 2010 (Part 1)

Do you ever have the feeling that you spend way too much time in Outlook? If you’re not checking the most recent email that just arrived, you’re searching for one you know you received and it’s somewhere in the 1,478 messages currently stacked up neatly in your Inbox.

It’s overwhelming and, worse than that, it sucks energy and time from your day. But, there are some Outlook 2010 features you can take advantage of to help increase your productivity so you can actually get out of Outlook 2010, allowing you to move along to another program.

1. Start actively using Color Categories: These look innocuous at first, but there’s a great deal of power in categorizing your Outlook items by color. How you categorize is totally dependent on how you work. Maybe you decide to categorize by project, by client, or by urgency. It doesn’t matter so long as you to start to assign categories to email, notes, tasks and appointments. You’ll find available categories and the ability to customize them by right-clicking an Outlook 2010 item. Click “Categorize” from that context-menu and the rest is fairly intuitive. After a short time, you’ll begin to see the colors taking shape in Outlook 2010 and you’ll know what an items pertains to solely by the assigned color.

2. Use Rules to Organize Incoming Messages: I think many of us receive a lot of messages each day that we don’t necessarily need to act upon but that we likely just need to keep a copy of. There are also those messages we receive because we’ve subscribed to a mailing list or regular newsletter. Those non-urgent messages quickly clutter an Inbox. To move them out so you can read them at a later time when you don’t have pressing issues looming, use Rules. Found on the Ribbon’s Home tab while looking at your Inbox, Rules are like little custom macros you create to allow Outlook 2010 to automatically take an action on incoming or outgoing messages based on criteria you set.

3. Take Advantage of Quick Steps: If you don’t quite trust Rules, but you do take similar steps frequently (like forwarding messages to a specific person or group), use Quick Steps instead. When you create a Quick Step (on the Ribbon’s home tab while looking at your Inbox), you define a set of actions you want Outlook 2010 to take whenever the Quick Step label is clicked. This way, you still have a pseudo Rule defined, but you control when it is applied.

Start applying these tips, and I will be sharing more in my next blog post. For more information on our Outlook 2012 course click here.