I am always wondering how many appointments the “average person” might have in his or her calendar. Whenever I look at new calendar apps, it seems that they have been built for people with 1 to 2 events per day, and about 5 to 8 per week. That’s definitely not what my calendar looks like – and the same is true for most of my colleagues in senior management positions.
In run a unit within the Vorwerk group which has about 350 individual contributors across different time zones – and for the last 6 months, I have also been responsible for another part of Vorwerk’s software engineering team in the United States. My calendar is in good shape (tidy, organized), but it is REALLY full of important things.
The same is true for my inbox. It’s not that I get lots of spam. I just get lots of email that is somewhere between good to know, important, very important, and highly urgent. I get it from lots of people inside and outside of the company, and it took my years to find a good way to create an organization systems that allows me to stay on top.
So, in order to fill the internet with more meaningless advice, I decided that I summarize by best tipps for organizing Outlook and Office as part of my blog series on Productivity – and maybe, some of the strategies are even useful to someone. This blog post will serve as Table of Contents for this special part of the series – here are some of the things that I have planned to show you:
- Organize E-Mail on Arrival with the “Holy Inbox” Concept
- Pin E-Mails from Top Contacts to the Top of the Inbox (only Outlook Web)
- Practice FRETMY or Use Notes for Incoming E-Mails (only for the web)
- The Sequence to Get Things Done: Read, Flag, Extract to ToDo, Follow Up
- Create “Linked” Notes with “Parallel Appointments” and Microsoft Outlook
- For Meeting Notes (incl. Groups)
- For Preparations
- Use Outlook’s “Calendar Board View” for Goals, Notes, Files & Links (web only)
- Use Outlook’s “Attachment View” to Find Things
(more to come)
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