When triaging your email, you want to fly through an inbox of 1000 very quickly. With the triaging technique, you can process 300 emails an hour. You can enhance that speed with a few more power accelerators. 

First, you can minimize extra clicks of the Delete key by auto-deleting meeting responses. Why bother saving anything that doesn’t have comments?

Secondly, in order to triage, most likely you are skimming and reading the email. This means the email is open in full screen. After reading an email in full screen, do you really want to return back to your inbox to only find that you need to open another email?  If you find that you are needing to skim emails during your triage, then choose the option to Open the Next Item after moving or deleting.

All these options can be found in Outlook 2010 under File, Options, under the Mail tab.

If you liked this tip, you may also like:

Sling Alibi | Color code your Outlook 2010 Inbox Messages

.NYC : Scheduling against multiple time zones with Outlook 2010

Smart Outlooking: Triage your Email

After spending time on the road, you can come back to find your Outlook Inbox overgrown and a weedy mess.  Although some people have professed allegiance to the “Inbox2” technique (which means dumping the mail into a folder that you never really check again), this could mean you may miss important emails. The color coding technique does help mitigate that risk; however there’s nothing like a healthy Outlook triage session. This will have you happy again to receive fresh emails. You too can son have an inbox as fresh as the first day of school.

The technique is an adaptation of the infamous Sean Seibel triage, which was explained to me in an in depth 90 minute serious discussion.  And of the many Outlooking techniques I have learned over the years, this one lasted a year, so definitely worthy to evangelize.

1. First, you have to have an insanely messy inbox – minimum of 500 emails, no more than 3000 (otherwise you need to consider the Inbox2 technique, created by someone who shall remain nameless in case you are wondering why he hasn’t responded to an email you sent him).
2. Most importantly, you need to select the option to Work Offline. Otherwise you’ll feel like you are digging a hole in the sand at high tide.
3. Next, you’ll need to create at 4 folders on your server (vs. local PST file). Keeping on the server ensures you have access to them when you are on the road.  Create the folders Action, Reference, Review, & Review (Internet) as a subdirectory of yourInbox:
   
• The Action folder is for items requiring a response from you.
• The Review folder is things you should read but don’t need to comment on.
• Likewise with the Review (Internet), except these mails contain information from the web. The separation is to create a separate sync category for offline & online documents. This way, you keep all offline content in one place for reviewing the folder from your cell phone or when you are on the plane. If you are always connected, you can combine the two Review folders.
• The Reference folder is for those FWs that people send you (don’t you love forwards). At first glance, it looks like TMI and meaningless but what if you need it one day? So save it as Reference until you can digest or file it properly .
4. Now you begin triaging. Write down the number of mails you are starting with.  Look at the clock and give yourself either 30 minutes or 60 minutes of uninterrupted time.  Be sure to have a beverage handy and turn off your cell phone. Open up your Inbox and start filing the email. Do not read the email, do not take any action unless it will take you less than 15 seconds.   When the time block has ended, check your rate. You’ll want to improve this over time.
5. Now most importantly, you’ll need to schedule a meeting with yourself to review those action items. Take time at the end or start of a day to clear out any actions. 
6. Set up your cell phone to sync with the Review folder.
7. Set up weekly meeting with yourself to read the online content in the Review (Internet) folder.

If you liked this tip, you may also like:

Sling Alibi | Color code your Outlook 2010 Inbox Messages

.NYC : Scheduling against multiple time zones with Outlook 2010

I could use some help finding a great tool that helps show many time zones in a guide similar to the beauty I created in MS Paint. Basically I want to be able to schedule meetings with people in more than 4 time zones and need a guide to see overlapping business hours. Right now, the yellow highlights indicate working hours (9am-6pm), and I have drawn red lines to try to find common times between multiple countries. The problem is that I have to adjust this seasonally. Right now, you are seeing the adjusted one for US Daylight Savings time & Israeli summer time.

Is there any client-side application that shows unlimited time zones side by side? I explored other options but it’s not enough. I suppose I could write one… I will add that as a to-do to my calendar, but, how will I know what time zone I will be in at the time? Now we need an app for that.

Windows 7 time zone management

Windows 7 supports 3 time zones in the system tray or you can place a gadget on your desktop for 8 time zones (thanks to the development team – aka Bryant Griffin Sr. for AGS Digital MultiClock).

Outlook 2010 time zone management

Outlook can show my meetings with two time zones side by side as well as schedule an appointment against a different time zone (very useful when you are on the road or whwn someone gives you a convenient time to meet according to their time zone).

Although not a new feature, the ability for Outlook to cast your calendar in multiple time zones is quite a useful one, as the work teams get more and more geographically dispersed.  It is easy to set up.  Go to File, Options and select Calendar. Scroll down until you see the section on Time Zones – choose the two time zones you work most frequently in. If you travel between them quite a bit, you can readily swap the one that you are currently in. All your appointments will shift to center the business hours squarely in the middle of your screen.

If you have quite a large span of hours between your time zones, you can ensure that business hours in one region do not scroll out of view by expanding your business hours.  In the same dialog box, you can change the work hours to be from 12AM-12AM, and then click on Saturday and Sunday, if you are in MEA, as those are working days for a good part of the region.

Your final screen should look something like this.

By default, Outlook will use your corporate Global Address Book (GAL) as the data source to check names.  When you type an email address into the “To”, you can hit CTRL+K and this will validate the letters you have typed against matching names in the GAL.  What if you want it to search your personal repository of contacts instead? You can change the default address book by clicking on the Contacts tab in the left hand Outlook pane.  At the right of the ribbon, click on the Address Book button.

Select Tools, Options. Then choose the Address Book you wish to use. If you do not see your desired address book listed, you can select the Add button to add a new list.