CUSTOMIZING MICROSOFT OUTLOOK FOR EFFICIENCY

Look at the number of emails in your inbox. How many of them are unread? If you are like most people, the number is probably at least somewhere in the hundreds, possibly more. Now ask yourself how often you have forgotten to respond to someone’s request for information because it gets buried. Or, how often have you sent a request to a coworker or customer and never heard back, then forgot to follow-up with them and the ball was dropped. Lastly, how much time do you spend each week searching for emails or attachments in those emails? No doubt it is significant! Not everyone has time to read a 300-page book on how the best use of a software application. Because of this, I wrote this guide to quickly enable the set up and use of Outlook to most effectively organize the daily deluge of emails that are sent and received. This guide will show you the simple, yet extremely effective methods that I have developed over the last 15 years to ensure you are using this tool to its fullest potential. Other guides contain hundreds of pages, and cover every detail of the software, taking hours to read. In contrast, this guide attempts to succinctly cover the simplest, yet most effective customizations. After all, this is about efficiency!As technology becomes more pervasive in the workplace, efficiency improves only if we learn to embrace it. So often I see people using tools so ineffectively that little is gained from them. For many companies, Microsoft Outlook continues to be a staple of workplace technology, however after 15 years in my professional career I have rarely seen it used to its full potential. This handbook is intended for those who heavily rely on Outlook yet have not taken the time to learn how it can greatly improve your productivity, making you more efficient and more accountable to yourself and those around you. I believe the phrase, “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” applies to this handbook. Implementing and perfecting each topic discussed will greatly increase your efficiency, specifically if you fully employ each one. I hope you enjoy it!