Outlook 2007 is the email client that I use daily at work, but as I was perusing through some of my archived articles on Google Reader I came across several articles on using Outlook as a project and task management tool, but had never gotten around to reading. I’m still in the process of working through some of these tweaks and tips, but I wanted highlight the top four tips that I’ve found most helpful in my daily workflow.
Outlook on the Desktop is a pretty cool application that puts a fully functional Outlook calendar onto my desktop. The hardest thing that I had to change and customize to use this calendar was actually my desktop wallpaper- since I had to find one that wasn’t too busy so that I could see my calendar clearly while still keeping Outlook on the Desktop somewhat transparent. Besides that little hiccup, its great to have my calendar visible- and the tray icon even displays the day of the month when I have other windows fully expanded. Outlook on the Desktop also includes the ability to switch between calendar, inbox, contacts, tasks and notes views, though I’ve only been using the calendar feature so far.
Sync Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook
I’m an avid Google Calendar user- I’ve used it through college and I’ve got my whole day planned out on Gcal. Fortunately – there’s a step-by-step walk through to sync up Gcal into Outlook.
Time Management with Microsoft Outlook
There’s an awesome blog post by 7Breaths that details how to use both OneNote 2007 and Outlook 2007 as a time and project management tool. Head over to the blog to read more about the specifics of the workflow, but the general gist of the process is as follows:
OneNote is used to collect ideas, and when a task or action step is identified, it is flagged into the Outlook ToDo list by using the shortcut CTRL+SHIFT+5. The Outlook calendar is then used along with color codes to map out commitments for the week.
I’ve grabbed a screenshot from 7Breaths’ article to show his color coded calendar layout.
Speed Up Microsoft Outlook IMAP
I work on both my EEE 1000HE netbook on the road, but also have my desktop workstation while I’m in the office- this creates the problem of how I access my email, since I want to make sure that the emails that I read on my desktop, will be marked as read (or correctly filed in its respective folders on the server). I found out that the solution for this is IMAP. However, one of the weaknesses of Outlook 2007 is that its implementation of IMAP is quite slow, and even causes my Outlook to hang. Fortunately (or unfortunately), I’m not the only one with this problem, and someone has figured out a small fix for this issue.
Apparently, the slow-down is due to the default Outlook 2007 setting which only dictates Outlook to download the email headers, so when you want to read the emails, Outlook stalls while it finishes downloading the complete email message.
To fix this, Press Ctrl+Alt+S in Outlook to to open the Outlook Send and Receive groups. Select the account you have set-up with IMAP and click Edit. The option that you want to select is under
‘Account Options’: Download complete items including attachments for subscribed folders.
This will increase the time of your periodic send/receive process, but will speed up the time that it takes to open up messages. Head over to the article to read some other tweaks to speed up Outlook.
Do you have any other productivity tips or tweaks that you’ve used to speed up your Outlook workflow? We’d love to hear them!
