Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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In a recent update I mentioned how impressed I was with Peggy Duncan as a speaker at PowerPoint LIVE. Her session on productivity was as amusing as it was enlightening.

It's always great when someone masters a computer program in terms of accomplishing a given task, as opposed to just learning its features — and Peggy has done that with Outlook. Her book is so full of practical tips and techniques that it makes learning the program (or improving your Outlook) a pleasure.

It's not surprising that the best book on Outlook I have seen comes not from a computer pro but a "soft skills" expert. Duncan counsels, the real commitment comes in maintenance — it's something you'll have to do every day. It'll be easier to do once you purge and get rid of all that junk and establish a home for everything you need to keep." (Italics added).

This is the essence of Duncan's wisdom — learn to purge and then get organized using Outlook's folder structure.

What is very helpful in Duncan's book is a generic structured folder list that you can adapt to your own needs. Her suggestions work with "real" folders (physical files in your office) as well as the virtual folders in Outlook. Not only that, they also relate to an interior folder structure that you could (and probably should) impose on your My Documents folder.

Another main point to consider is the cost/benefit of doing the organizational groundwork versus not doing it. Just picking up a book like this might seem daunting — but as Duncan suggests, doing the work required to learn the organizational skills will ultimately pay off big time — buy freeing up more of your personal and professional time.

A great analogy is Duncan's challenge early in the book: if you needed a file (or email) on your computer, how long would it take to locate it?

The resulting gap is the key to productivity. Doing the groundwork to make sure you can locate such files later on will inevitably pay dividends — and Duncan gives you the tools to do just that as well as the motivation to get it done.

Another excellent suggestion is with respect to the use of subject lines; Duncan suggests an ALL CAPS code for action items like CALL, MEET, SPEAK, ACTION, TRAVEL and FYI. Obviously once you master and apply these, you can modify and add your own to complement your own activities.

Not surprisingly Duncan is also a proponent of using the Outlook organizational features for filtering email, and specifically using span filters.

Another cool suggestion is creating a Delay Send folder for outgoing messages. This is helpful if you are a volatile person who impulsively sends email you later regret, or simply work at odd hours and don't want people to think that you are available at such inopportune times.

(If you send a message to your boss at 2 am, he or she may give you credit for working at that absurd hour, but may also decide that that gives them the right to ask you to do even more or even call you up).

Duncan also shows you ways of using the Signature feature in Outlook to send repetitive and redundant information. She goes further by creating a dummy message with your contact information that you can include as a signature on future correspondence. This gives you additional flexibility for including different signatures for different tasks.

In Duncan's line of business she has created a specific toolbar that instantly creates new messages for a specified group of colleagues — in her case, speakers. While creating custom toolbars is not a new feature, and we've covered it in this Reference Guide before, doing is in the context of a specific business task is quite helpful in terms of demonstrating its usefulness, so that an Outlook user might actually go ahead and do this for his or her own business when it becomes obvious what a timesaver it is.

This is the essence of Duncan's message — you don't necessarily need to go to the lengths she goes to organize your business or other enterprise. But to whatever extent you implement some or all of her techniques you will ultimately save much more time in the your activities going forward than you spend mastering the techniques and implementing them in the near future.

Another key concept for streamlining your email workload is to think of your Inbox only in terms of temporary storage. For most of us this requires some serious mental reprogramming, but it once again will pay dividends in terms of increased future productivity — you will not need to slog through a crammed inbox if you follow some of Duncan's suggestions for redistributing, reorganizing and purging your email from its first destination — the Inbox.

And you're not limited to other Outlook mail folders. Another very cool suggestion is dragging an email message into your Calendar and instantly creating an appointment to address it's needs.

This lessens your tendency to do everything NOW — instead you can budget your email time to handle the load in one time segment, while rescheduling (and not necessarily procrastinating) addressing items that do not need immediate attention.

The book concludes with a series of "challenges," or mini case studies, that address specific email productivity challenges. Whether you face the same ones or similar situations you will find these amusing and on point.

Finally there are suggestions for making your email reflect your corporate image or brand.

The difference between this business-oriented book and most computer textbooks is that everything is put in terms of achieving a concrete goal — which makes it far more likely IMHO (in my humble opinion) that you will ultimately learn, master and implement these techniques — to your ultimate benefit.

To learn more about Duncan's practice and her other books, visit www.peggyduncan.com.

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