May 8, 2011<\/p>\n
I was talking with the managing director of a large (100K+ employees) management consulting company at a social event the other evening and he described their main problem with e-mail these days. He said that their managers who travel a lot skim through their Outlook-based e-mail on their smartphone quickly, and then end up leaving messages marked unread that then never get the action they need\u2014they don\u2019t get revisited in a timely fashion—so lots of things drop through the cracks.<\/p>\n
This is so familiar and it’s a classic case of needing to convert action e-mails to tasks\u2014a key teaching of the MYN system<\/a>. But how do you convert action e-mails into Outlook tasks on your mobile device?<\/p>\n Well, it greatly depends on your task server<\/a> and what mobile OS you have.<\/p>\n But in my mind there is only one really good solution: TouchDown<\/a>—the rest are merely workarounds. However, you must have Exchange and an Android device to use TouchDown. If you do, Touchdown is by far your best solution because it allows you to convert e-mails directly to tasks, and they show up immediately in your Outlook tasks list. And the TouchDown tasks view on Android formats well for MYN. TouchDown is the only mobile app I know of that allows converting e-mails directly into Outlook tasks, and in my mind it is a great reason to favor the use of Android over iOS or BlackBerry.<\/p>\n But if you do not have Android or Exchange, here is more advice from page 135 in my new Outlook book<\/a>:<\/p>\n \u2026not many other mobile systems allow [converting e-mails to tasks]. So, here\u2019s the alternate solution I mentioned earlier. If you get an e-mail on your mobile device that has an action for you in it that you cannot do now, just forward the message back to yourself and put the word \u201cTASK:\u201d (all caps) at the beginning of the subject line. That way you will know to convert it to a task when you see it back at your primary computer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n If that is too much work, you can also use the Mark as Unread command inside the e-mail before you close it. Hopefully, the bold appearance will pull the message back into your awareness when at your full copy of Outlook later.<\/p>\n If all you need to do is remember to write a longish reply to the e-mail later, TouchDown lets you flag e-mails too, and the flags show up back in Outlook for later action. Deferred replies are the only case I recommend using flags<\/a>. If you cannot set flags on your mobile device, a workaround for this is to (like above) forward the e-mail back to yourself but this time put the word \u201cREPLY:\u201d (all caps) at the beginning of the subject line.<\/p>\n And finally, if you are open to using another application other than Outlook to manage your tasks, then use ToodleDo<\/a> as your task server. It allows you to convert e-mails to tasks<\/a> using a simple forward and it works on all mobile devices and their mail systems.<\/p>\n Michael<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" May 8, 2011 I was talking with the managing director of a large (100K+ employees) management consulting company at a social event the other evening and he described their main problem with e-mail these days. He said that their managers … Continue reading