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Welcome back to the podcast!
This week’s episode: “Tag ‘em and Flag ‘em – Following Up, Outlook Style!”
As a cyber pack rat, I have a lot of things that I probably should have deleted or thrown away a long time ago, but I just can’t seem to do it. My collection includes computer cables, old gadgets, files on floppy and zip disks, hundreds of unlabeled CDs, and most of all, e-mail.
Out of all of these, the hardest one to part with has to be my e-mail. I have actually been known to keep spam and archive it. (Well, you never know when it might come in handy. Also, I hear it tastes like chicken.) Okay, that even sounded weird to me, even though it sounded perfectly normal in my head.
So you might say that this is unhealthy, a waste of time and space; and I used to agree, in theory…just not always in practice. Then I met our VP of Business Development, who deletes virtually nothing.
So I asked him, “Why don’t you ever delete these things?” He responded, “You never know when you might need to go back and dig up a e-mail where someone had agreed to something and then denied it later, or when someone had an idea for a great project that just wasn’t do-able at the time, but could be great down the road somewhere. But most importantly, you never want to miss a follow-up with a business contact.”
I thought that was some great insight…and I finally had a rational excuse for saving all my e-mail and looking for ways to stay on top of important messages coming in!
So here are a few suggestions for you, because I know I am not the only cyber pack rat out there:
- If the item looks like it may be important somewhere down the road, then add a flag to the message.
- If the item needs a quick reminder to follow-up or start working on it, add a flag with a reminder on the message. (Just note that in versions prior to Outlook 2007, you have to leave the message in your Inbox or else the reminder will not go off.)
- Try adding a category to the message (in Outlook 2003 and later, you can pick pretty colors).
- If the message is for an upcoming meeting but not yet on your calendar, drag the message to your calendar and change the date/time so you can block out the time in your schedule.
- Here’s the best part of all of these things: there’s no need to delete! Just live in denial by flagging, marking your message as being read, then only view your messages in the “Unread Mail” view. “Look Ma, my Mailbox is clean…so long as you don’t look under the bed.”
But remember to be nice to the server guys and archive your messages every once in a while to conserve space and speed up your Mailbox. Now that you can get 500GB hard drives for under $100, why permanently delete everything when you can become a great e-mail historian? And if you have a flagged item that no longer needs following up, you can always mark it as completed.
There are more great tips for using Outlook to improve your follow-up in this week’s recommended eTraining class, Top Ten Tips for Microsoft Outlook. There’s a link to the schedule in this week’s blog entry, which you can find at www.productiveUpodcast.com.
Well, that’s all for this week. If you find these tips useful, be sure to leave us a comment at www.productiveupodcast.com, visit us on Twitter @productiveUcast, or write a review of our podcast on iTunes.
See you next time!
Music courtesy of Clayton & Fulcrum.
