Getting Organized…

One of the problems we have in our office (and most business owners have) is that we all wear many different hats.  While officially, I am the Business IT Adviser for Mavidea, I also help out occasionally with some copywriting.  At times, I get called on to answer some Microsoft-related questions.  I’m also the closest thing we have (so far) to a regular blogger (though I realize you may not believe it based on how long it has been since I updated my blog).  The end result is that I get a lot of e-mail on a variety of topics.  (Sound familiar?)  These e-mails are frequently something like:

“Call Company X.  Heard they landed a big new deal and may need help with their technology.”

If I’m in the middle of something else, I may not have time to drop what I am doing and call them right this second.  But I obviously don’t want to lose track of this.  We have a line-of-business database that helps manage items like this, but when things come in randomly via e-mail, it’s not always as helpful as it could be.  Enter Outlook 2007.

I realize that Office 2010 is on its way to store shelves in a few short months.  but, that doesn’t stop this advice from being effective and pertinent.  (I’m guessing the things I discuss here will still be present in Office 2010.)

Let’s start with a scenario.  One of my co-workers who shall remain nameless uses the time-honored system of “an open e-mail is something to deal with.”  Familiar with this system?  Chances are, someone in your organization uses it.  At any one point in time, they have dozens of e-mails open in their taskbar.  This is a system that I used to use… until one day, when I had a plethora of important e-mails open, waiting to be dealt with, my PC froze.  I had to reboot.  When I did, I lost all of those open e-mails.  Sure, they were still in my inbox.  But I had to go through item by item to see what needed to be dealt with.  Since I didn’t have time to deal with them in the first place, I certainly didn’t have time to go back and figure out what needed to be dealt with!

Read vs. Unread

Then, I started to use the read and unread status of the message.  I would turn off “automatically mark a message read,” so anytime I wanted to follow-up on something, I would just leave it unread.  Then, I could change the view in Outlook to “only unread messages” and see what still needed to be followed up on.  This was better than the open messages, but did nothing to prioritize or categorize the messages.  (You can change your view using the menu shown below.)

Planting a Flag

Flags introduced a new way to follow-up on items in Outlook (and they’ve been around awhile now).  You can simply click the flag button to “flag an item for follow-up.”  Right-clicking the flag even gives you the menu shown below. 

You can pick the due date on the item.  You can also add a reminder so that you don’t forget about it.  If you go in and flag something now, you will see that it gets added to your “to-do" bar.”  (If you don’t see your to-do bar, ensure it is turned on.  Using the same menu shown above (the “view” menu), click to-do bar and ensure it is set to normal.)  This is a handy way to ensure that you follow-up on something by a required date.  Using the “Set Quick Click” option (at the bottom of the menu), you can choose your default default settings for every item you click. 

Once you’ve set a flag and the item shows up in your to-do bar, you will see that double-clicking the item in your to-do bar actually opens the e-mail.  This means you don’t have to spend time searching for the original e-mail.  It’s right there at your fingertips.

While the flag helps you keep track of what needs to get done and allows you to prioritize items by setting a due date, it still doesn’t help you categorize your items.

 ABCategorizing

The categorize feature in Outlook is easily one of the more powerful (and most under-utilized) organizational tools available.  Chances are, you’ve seen the “categorize” button.  Maybe you’ve even clicked on it to see what it does.  Spending a few minutes understanding how this button can help you can save you a LOT of time over the course of a year.  (Wish I had a great statistic to enter here to make this sound more official.  Trust me – try it and see how much easier it makes your life!)  Let’s take a look at the button and it’s menu.

The button itself is the four colored squares, reminiscent of the Windows logo.  You can see the various menu options here.  If you’ve never done anything with this, then your categories will all be named with the color of the icon.  As you can see in the picture above, I’ve renamed my blue, green, and purple categories to leads, login info, and research respectively. 

Think of the categories as a way to file your e-mail.  They allow you to add some extra information to any individual piece of mail without moving it into a different folder.  Before we get too far, let’s take a look at the “All Categories” menu.

As you can see from the picture above, there are 25 different colors you can use to identify a category.  You can associate a name with each individual category.  If you’re a keyboard kind of person, you can even assign a shortcut key to the category using the button on the right (shortcut keys will be a combination of ctrl and a function key).  This means you can assign an e-mail to a category simply by clicking your shortcut key while reading the e-mail.

To really understand how categories can help us be organized, let’s look at an example.  Let’s say I get a piece of e-mail from my Chief Technology Officer with the subject, “Are Small Businesses Prepared for Disaster?”  Upon opening it, I find a link along with this text, “Great article on small business backups.  Use this when talking with customers.”  I don’t have time to read it right now, but it is obviously an article I need to read.  I would assign this to my “research” category, which is purple.  I can do this any number of ways, including using a shortcut key (if I have assigned one), clicking the categorize button and selecting “research,” or simply right-clicking the category button on the e-mail as shown below.

Like the flag, I also have the option of setting a “Quick Click” default.  You can also use the built-in rules wizard to automatically assign a category based on keywords.  I know, for instance, that our line-of-business database always sends me e-mails formatted the same way for specific activities.  An e-mail to build a quote for a customer always has the following phrases:  “New Activity” and “Create Quote.”  I can set up a rule to automatically categorize all e-mails with these phrases into the “Quote” category.  This allows me to prioritize these mails before I’ve even read them in my inbox!

Where Oh Where has my E-mail Gone?

This categorization of e-mail is enough to significantly improve my organization, but we’re not done.  The most impressive aspect of categorization is when you combine it with a feature in Outlook called Search Folders.  As you can see in the picture above, you have the option to create a Category Search Folder.  This allows you to create a folder which will display mail that fits a set of rules without actually moving the mail!

For instance, I categorized the mail from our CTO earlier as research.  If I go into the “Create Category Search Folder” menu shown above, it brings up the menu shown here.

I can set the category I want to filter on and the mailbox I want to use.  Then, I click OK and I have created a search folder.  This folder will show me all of the mail matching my criteria (in this case, all mail categorized as research) without moving it!  I simply need to click on the “Research folder” listed under Search Folders in Outlook.

You can see from the picture above that it automatically updates that folder with the number of unread messages, just as any other folder does.  I also have the option of moving that search folder up to my “Favorite Folders” to make it even easier to use.

And the Search Folder doesn’t stop with categories.  You can use a Search Folder to find and filter e-mail on a number of different criteria.  This is one of the single most powerful tools in Outlook!  It keeps you from having to build a complicated folder system for filtering out mail.  You can leave it all in one folder and use Search Folders to separate it.

I’m sure you’ve already stopped reading by this point and are in Outlook setting up your own organizational structure, taking advantage of all the things you’ve just learned.  In a future post, I’ll go through some more tips and tricks to help you get the most out of Outlook 2007.  Being more organized in Outlook means getting more time to do the things you want to do!!!