Talkin' Tools: Let's Talk Outlook

I know there are some folks out there who hate anything that Microsoft has ever breathed on, but I will freely admit to having drunk Bill Gates' Kool-Aid and being a happy camp follower, with the conviction that Outlook is really "the greatest thing since sliced bread."

Whether by free choice or "the malevolent power of monopoly," Outlook has become the most widely used calendar/email application in the business world, so even if you don't use it at home, you will very likely need to be familiar with it in your work environment.

This wide use it makes it certain that most users are not getting everything they could from Outlook and the probability is high that you are one of those leaving many features of this great application unexplored or underused.

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done, is very big on using Outlook as a productivity tool.  His website even sells an application to tweak your Outlook program's notes and tasks features to make them more useful to people using his system. But that aside there may be a number of things that you can do with Outlook to improve your use of it without any add-ons.

Here are some of the things that I have found useful:

Right clicking on any name or email address that is in the "From" "To" "Cc" or "Bcc" fields, whether in an email that you are sending or one you have received, opens up a dialogue box that allows you to add it to your contacts, or look up the Outlook properties of the address. From Outlook properties the email address can be obtained, even if all you see at the top of the email is the name of the person, rather than the actual address.

You may know how to add tasks to your task list and you might know how to set alarms for emails that you need to act on (click on Actions, Follow Up for that feature), but did you know that you can drag emails to tasks, to calendar, and to notes?  You can also drag notes to email (Inbox), tasks and calendar, and you can drag calendar items to email, notes and tasks.  When you drag items between these Outlook features, they are copied without leaving where they originally were. Dragging an email to Contacts creates a contact with the body of the email sitting in the notes field, then dragging that contact over to the Calendar creates an appointment or reminder that contains all the information in that email along with all the contact information from the contact entry.  Dragging a contact to your email creates a ready-to-send email with all the contact info in it.

Dragging tasks to the calendar permits you to set an appointment for that task, while dragging a calendar item to tasks allow you to track the progress of that item.  The main difference between tasks and calendar items is that tasks are tracked according to how close to completion they are and not by time, while calendar items are tied to a date and/or time.  David Allen says that one of the most common mistakes people make is writing things on their calendars that are not really time driven.  Your calendar should be sacred space and the only things that you want to put there are things that must be done on a specific day and/or that are tied to a definite time. If you have a dental appointment, that goes on your calendar. A reminder to yourself to get with your HR manager to talk about your dental coverage would not go into the calendar.  That would be a task (or in GTD language, a "project").  Once you have called the HR office and set up an appointment to have that conversation, then you would put it in your calendar.  A calendar (whether Outlook or paper) is not useful for reminding you of things that are not tied to a date or time, because those things are too amorphous and your commitment to get them done on that particular day is contingent on what comes up.  What ends up happening is that they become a kind of run-on to-do list that gets carried from day to day and creates confusion rather than clarity about your day when you look at it.

On the other hand, for things that are tied to a date and time, your Outlook calendar is a great resource because you can set alarms for it and you can snooze the alarms.  The snoozing part is helpful because it allows you to get a heads up about things that are coming, to keep aware of them without having to keep them on your mind, because you know the calendar is keeping track of them. When I have something coming up, I will set the alarm anywhere from 2 to 7 days in advance.  I set all the alarms on all family birthdays and anniversaries a week in advance giving me plenty of time to send a card and still be reminded on that day to give the person a call. If you like to carry around a paper calendar or keep one on your desk, you can print the pages of your Outlook calendar to fit just about any size binder you like.

You can also print out your Outlook contacts in a number of different formats.  The search feature in Contacts allows you to bring up contacts according to categories, useful for printing, say, all the phone numbers of your kid's soccer team.  Categories can also be assigned to tasks, calendar items, emails and note, (right click on a note to assign it to a category.)  You can use this feature to assemble together all contacts, emails, tasks, appointments and notes that are associated with a given project.

These can all be very powerful tools, but the feature that has saved me the most time in Outlook has to be Microsoft Word.  I use Microsoft Word as my email editor.  This is optional and can be changed (Tools, Options, Mail Format).  Using Word as my email editor has proven to be a great advantage for handling documents that temporarily reside on my computer – like articles that I have to edit.  I used to save all the attachments that I received from authors as documents in my own files – a very clumsy system. Now, if I am working on a document sent by email and I need to save it for some days, I just copy it over to drafts in Outlook.  It can be deleted with one click when I am finished with it. Greatest thing since sliced bread.

Please give us your comments and let us know what your favorite Outlook uses and tricks are.