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 work offline mode stuck 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?

• These would be your Archive Folders at the bottom of the Navigation (Folder) Pane.
• To view the Scheduling Assistant when composing a meeting request, on the Meeting tab, in the Show group, select Scheduling Assistant.
• To select a meeting time, select a time suggestion in the Room Finder pane in the Suggested times section, or pick a time on the free/busy grid.
• A best practice is to use separate mail accounts for work and personal communications.
• Your calendar should be treated as your real plan for your time — if you have scheduled it, then that is what you are committed to doing at that time.

To do this, select the Recurrence button and change the end date. If you find that you are often performing searches across your whole mailbox, you can set the default search scope to always search across all folders by going to the Backstage view. All search terms are additive, so if you want to find a message from someone with attachments, select the commands on the ribbon (From, Has Attachments) to build your search.

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Messages to a Contact Group that only occasionally contain useful or interesting content, regardless of frequency, should have a rule and a folder. It’s a best practice to have a central repository for your messages, so that you can refer to them after fix MFA prompts not working you've "dealt" with them. The Navigation Pane folder list should be reserved for folders you use often. If it's filled with folders you don't even recognize, move all mail into the reference folder and delete your existing folders.

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

I don't manage his inbox but I did help FixTechGuide fix for stuck folders him get the Stack method set up and he's blown away by how awesome it is, so now thinks I'm an Outlook wizard. I'm decent but certainly not an expert - so I figure before I actually lead a training I should brush up. It’s liberating to depend on Outlook instead of your overtaxed brain to keep track of your tasks.

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This is a simple feature that is perfect for any professional who is constantly in and out of meetings every day. If possible, keep your personal and business tasks in one place. Keeping one list reduces the number of places that you need to look for what needs to be done. Even if you already have only one list, use categories to sort your personal from business tasks and manage your list effectively. Your personal tasks will be stored on your company's Exchange Server and could be visible to your IT department, so only put appropriate personal tasks on your list.

Set Up Quick Steps

Let rules help you to read what is most interesting and pertinent to you. Read and unread states in Outlook help by showing you quickly which messages have been read at least once and which have not. However, the read and unread states of messages can be easily be triggered by clicking around your messages so they aren’t a perfect record — just a tool.