Improving Your Outlook

Usability studies have shown that there are several types of email personalities popular today. There are the Mark as Unread users, the Clean Inbox users, the Category users, and the Multiple Folder users.

Mark as Unread users leave any email messages they need to respond to as unread. This usually results in large numbers of unread email messages with no particular organization. Clean Inbox users and Multiple Folder users can be one and the same. These users either immediately file all their emails in other folders or print and delete their emails in order to keep their inbox uncluttered. Category users assign every message to a category and then group their messages by category. Outlook can accommodate all these different types of users, but also provides methods to be even more efficient and productive than the listed email personalities.

Instead of marking your messages as unread, you can Quick Flag a message for easy retrieval at a later time. By assigning different flag colors to different categories, you can tell with a quick glance what types of items are flagged by their color. You an even use these same color/category combinations with your calendar labels. Even though Outlook doesn't let you customize the names for the Quick Flag colors, if you routinely assign a yellow flag to items from your supervisor, it won't be very long before you can instantly tell how many items from your supervisor require follow up.

With the new two-line Inbox view, right-side Reading Pane, and new Quick Flag feature, you can quickly find and respond to the most important messages in your Inbox.