Show Only Important E-mail Notifications

How to Turn E-mail Notifications Off

Showing Conversation Threads in E-mail

Configuring to See Tasks that Start Tomorrow

Color Coding Tasks with Notes and Attachments

Auto Filing vs. Auto Tagging E-mail

Color Coding Old Defer-to-Review Tasks

All About Outlook Recurring Tasks

 

System Expansions: Additional Material on the TWC-MYN System (not in the book)


How to Show Only Important E-mail Notifications

October 8, 2009

You probably know you should turn off Outlook’s e-mail notifications to limit interruptions, but you have probably resisted because you are afraid of missing some important mail. Well here is an approach that will definitely make this practical.

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How to Turn Off Outlook E-mail Notifications

October 8, 2009

I am a big fan of turning off e-mail notifications in Outlook, particularly the blue notification rectangle that announces new mail in Outlook versions 2003 and later (officially called the Desktop Alert in Outlook). The trouble with that box is it displays just enough of the message to suck you in completely, thus truly doing a great job of wrenching your attention away from higher priority work. Research shows it can take up to five minutes for a worker to completely refocus on a task after an interruption. So as these things pop up every 5 or 10 minutes, or even more often, guess what—your productivity is getting hosed (even if you do not stop and open the mail item). You will want to turn them off.

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Arranging Your Outlook E-mail list by Conversation Threads

April 29, 2009

The ability to Sort, Arrange, and Group items in Outlook’s list views is a powerful tool in Outlook. One of the most useful of these, and probably least used, is arranging e-mail by Conversation, a feature similar to how Gmail works. Let’s talk about that for Outlook 2003 and 2007 (earlier versions of Outlook have different choices that are not covered here).

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Configuring to See Tasks that Start Tomorrow

April 1, 2009

One thing some people miss with the Now-Tasks list (the task list on your TaskPad or To-Do Bar in the MYN sytem) is a way to easily highlight tasks coming up the very next day. Recall that the standard MYN Now-Task list (on the TaskPad and To-Do Bar) hides all future tasks; but sometimes it is good to be aware of tasks one day before they hit the list, so you can prepare for them. Well, Juergen Ahaus, who was in a seminar I taught at HP, wrote later showing a way to do this. He created a Tasks folder view similar to the MYN All Now Tasks view in Lesson 12 of the book (which does show future tasks), but extended it by clearly color coding tasks coming up for the very next day.

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Color Coding Tasks with Notes and Attachments

April 1, 2009

A while back I mentioned that it may be useful to know, from the TaskPad or To-Do Bar, which tasks have more information stored inside the notes field. That way you are not double-clicking all tasks when reviewing them… you know which are worthwhile to open. The way I enabled this before (per an excellent suggestion from Jim Conzelman) was to add a Notes column to the TaskPad/To-Do Bar, and size it very narrow. If I saw any text at all in the narrow column then I knew more was in the notes field. That worked fairly well.
However, many people hate to add any columns to the TaskPad/To-Do Bar because they take up valuable screen real estate. Many don’t even add the attachments column (to see which tasks have attachments) for the same reason.

Well, Larry Winger wrote in with a way to color code the text of tasks that have notes inside, as well as a way to color code tasks that have attachments; this avoids adding extra columns.

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Auto Filing vs. Auto Tagging E-mail

Aug 20, 2008

Many of you may auto file some or much of your Outlook mail. This is the act of creating an Outlook rule to automatically move mail into a specific folder as the mail arrives; the rule looks for mail from certain senders or with certain keywords. This can work well to lower apparent e-mail you get, however it can be risky at times and there are better ways to do it. Read on to learn more. Note: much of this article is just a new perspective on material already in the book, but at the end of this article I give a new tip not discussed there.

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Color Coding Old Defer-to-Review Tasks

Aug 20, 2008

If you have been using the powerful Defer-to-Review techniques in Lesson 9 of the book’s second edition for a while now, then here’s something that you may be ready for. I find it is useful to know approximately how long a task has been around, so I can decide more easily if it is time to delete it. In this article, I show you how to color code older tasks, to help identify tasks perhaps ready to delete..

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All About Outlook Recurring Tasks

May 23, 2008

This article describes how recurring tasks work in Outlook, and how to fix your recurring tasks when you switch from a Due Date field based system to a Start Date field system (as recommended in Edition 2 of the book).

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