These still apply to today’s world but have been lost in the flurry of digital organizing. "Working less" means you touch each piece of correspondence one time only. Whether it’s an actual paper envelope with a letter or whether it’s an email. "Correspondence" means Incoming Information, not necessarily "follow-up tasks". In this article, we’ll give you some of the best Outlook hacks for digital office management, along with some awesome Outlook tips and tricks featured in the Outlook Login Issues Troubleshooting program. I told my boss I'd like to give a (voluntary) company-wide training in something someday as a self-development goal and he suggested Outlook/inbox management.

How can I manage complicated tasks?

For example, many messages can be responded to in two minutes or less. But if a message takes longer than two minutes to deal with, defer it. To get a sense of what two minutes feels like, try timing yourself. If you never want to receive another message as part of this conversation, ignore it. Categories aren’t a required aspect of this system, but they will make your life easier if you are diligent about using them. For example, they can help you more easily identify what you can do now and help you group similar tasks so that you can do them all at once.

I have 10 minutes: What should I read first in my Inbox?

• Each additional person you invite to a meeting adds to the complexity of the meeting, making it harder to control.
• These statistics show the importance of efficiently managing your inbox.
• Looking at the whole picture of your time and your tasks will help you to prioritize important work over less urgent tasks.
• Search folders are useful for gathering information from across different mail and RSS folders.
• You can’t read every message you receive — nor should you try to.
• The tool that you use to collaborate during a meeting depends on the location and access of your participants.
• Reviewing your past week and upcoming week is also a useful way to help you prepare for a weekly meeting with your manager or help you prepare a status email message.
• The Room Finder pane contains suggested times for the best time for your meeting (when most attendees are available).

For example, if you have only a few minutes, make all of your phone calls (if you have just a few). Tackle energy-intensive tasks (for some, that might be responding to messages) when you have more energy. Deal with your low-energy tasks, such as reading status messages, later in the day or whenever your energy is lower. By "bulk processing" your tasks, you will make progress on all of your projects simultaneously. Sometimes you receive a message that you don’t need to act upon, but which you might need at a future date.

Fix Tech Issues Fast

CiraSync allows you to sync shared mailboxes at your company, shared mailboxes at another company, public folders, and Salesforce contacts. There a tons of postings listing tons of errors, but Microsoft didn't fix any of them and will release it anyways. The third office file system is the "Perennial file" and I’m not talking about flowers here. These would be your Archive Folders at the bottom of the Microsoft Outlook Email Repair Tool Online Navigation (Folder) Pane. They would probably contain contract files, corporate records, tax records, etc. In the days of "paper offices" (pre-computer age), we had 3 filing systems.

Advanced: How do I create a Search Folder for email messages?

To apply the "Work Less" theory, have Outlook automatically file an email. Then you can read them all at one time without distraction. If you just want to remember a few related tasks, list them in troubleshoot Outlook synchronizing folders error the body of the task. If you have more than 20 items in your Inbox, process the last week of messages and then select the remaining messages and move them to your 1-Reference folder.



That's not to say that there isn't a need for browsing through messages that are all on a particular topic or project. Outlook provides better tools — such as categories and search folders — so you can search effectively. By viewing your messages in conversation view, you can easily see which conversations have had the most back-and-forth discussion. In those cases, you might want to read and respond to only the last message in the conversation.

Set Up Quick Steps

Rules help this process by moving messages into folders based on criteria that you set. Rules filter the messages coming into your Inbox for must-read items only. Favorites, a subset of your mail folders, appear at the top of the navigation pane. Outlook’s Calendar Reminders feature helps users keep their calendars in order so they don’t miss any crucial appointments or meetings.