Chances are some of your inbox emails contain actions for you to do. It pays to have a system for keeping track of these actions. The natural way to do this is to put the action into your task list or calendar. If you use Outlook, doing this is a simple drag-and-drop operation.
Note: while Outlook 2003 lets you Flag emails, over-reliance on these flags can give you two task lists: your existing one and the flagged items within Outlook. While you may be able to manage this, it’s a lot better to have all of your actions within your Outlook Task list so you can assign due dates to them and so you have One Place to look for your tasks.
To see how to use Outlook to turn an email into a task, let’s look at a couple of screenshots:
In the above screenshot, you can see a few emails and also the Outlook Bar, which has Mail, Calendar, Contacts, and Tasks tabs. To convert an email into a Task, you simply select the email with your mouse and drag it to the Task bar. As soon as you do, the following will pop up:
Notice that Outlook automatically gives the Task the same name as the subject of the email (in this example, I dragged the second email to the Tasks Bar). Chances are you would want to change this so it actually sounds like a task: that is, so it has action verbs and an expected action. For example, you may title it “Call Jason and thank him for great PD product.”
You can then assign a date and priority and category to the task, and then handle it at the appropriate time.
You could also drag an email into your Calendar so it becomes an appointment. As with the task example, it’s up to you to set the date and time and to specify the title of the appointment.
For Lotus Notes users, do you have the same capability? Not having used Lotus before, I am unfamiliar with it. I would suppose that it has a similar capability but am not certain by any means. Do you have other Outlook tips and tricks to share?