Digital Chaos Control

Tag: to-do

How To Easily Follow-up on Those Important Emails in Outlook
If you’ve gone through the process of email organization (see my blog post here: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive), then you hopefully have a streamlined inbox with just the most important emails.

You also should have a daily routine of dealing with those emails that consists of:
1. Evaluating
2. Acting On, filing, or flagging for follow-up
Flagging an email in Outlook creates a follow-up to-do item.

Your email is not only marked with a flag in your Inbox, it’s also listed in your Tasks view under “To-Do List”, in the To-do sidebar, and in the Daily Task List in your calendar.

(Outlook treats your email to-do a little differently than a task that you’ve created. You can’t assign it to someone else, for example, or track its progress. If you delete the email, then you delete the to-do.)

If your email account is a POP account, open the email and select a flag for Today, Tomorrow, Next Week, etc. If your email account is an IMAP account, you have only the option of a flag with no follow-up date.

You can then sort your email inbox by selecting “Arrange By: Flag” under the View menu.

You can also look at these flagged emails in Tasks under “To-Do List”. (Outlook lists IMAP emails under Due Date: No Date.)

If you want to create an actual Outlook task, rather than an email to-do, then you can drag the email to Tasks on the navigation bar. Outlook saves the email content to the body of the new task. You can now delete the original email if you wish. Since you will be able to assign a due date for the task, this is the recommended method for any IMAP account.

Here’s a detailed blog post outlining this method: How to Create a Task from an Email Message.

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”

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June 7, 2016
3 Reasons to Stop Using Email as a To-do List
Staying on top of email chaos is not easy.

Even after you’ve followed the steps to manage your email inbox (see my blog post here: 4 Steps to Becoming More Responsive), you still need to deal with those emails that need a follow-up task. How do you make sure that you get those done, and that they don’t get lost in the daily shuffle?

There may be event invitations that you leave in your Inbox to remember the date. There may be questions from clients whose emails you need to follow up on later. There may be business partners sending information that you’d like to read when you have time.

The easiest way is to have a daily routine to review and act on those emails. If you flag the most important emails, you can review them daily. You can then delete them or archive them as you finish your follow-ups.

But it’s easy to get behind with those email tasks.

You may find yourself with a list of flagged emails that just keeps growing. They’re all important, but how do you find the time to get through them? Are they all equally important?

Here are three good reasons to not leave those emails as to-dos in your Inbox:
1. You may have to read the emails to see what they are. In a to-do list, you have clear task titles. You may even want to use the “action title” method that I mention in this blog post: I never finish anythin….
2. It’s not easy to prioritize your email tasks. You can try using different color flags or stars, but then you have to take context into consideration. Are you mixing your personal and work emails? What about emails from clients mixed up with emails from vendors?
3. While you’re working on your sorted, prioritized Inbox, you have emails coming in. You won’t see them until you change your sort order back to dated order.
Have another look at my blog post here: How to Integrate Email with Task Management and think about installing a task manager instead.

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May 27, 2016
I never finish anythin…

If you’re using your email inbox as a task list, you’re probably seeing it get out of control. Even if you’re flagging important emails and looking at your flagged email daily, are you feeling a little worn-down with how many emails you’re seeing? Seeing a long to-do list or a stack of actionable emails can leave you feeling like throwing in the towel.

You know that you can’t give up. You need to get through them because they were important enough to flag in the first place. The root of the problem is that it takes too much of your attention and decision-making skills to look at each one and determine the action needed.

Save your email as a task

In my blog post here: How to Ingrate Email with Task Management I write about integrating your email with a task manager. If you save an email as an actual task, then you can re-write the title and add notes to help you to remember what it is that you have to do. Wouldn’t it be much easier to look at a list of actionable tasks then a list of emails with vague titles?

You still may have a to-do list that’s long, but if you focus on your top 5 every day then you can whittle down your list over time. (If you list continues to grow because of too-full days, you may also want to look at delegating and outsourcing.)

Every task is an action

One great technique for a to-do list is to make every task an action. I.e., if you have an email from David titled: “Hey Robin, can we talk soon?” you need a task that’s more like: “Contact David and schedule a discussion”.

Here’s a great article about organizing your to-do list by emotion: Sort Your To-do List By Emotion. If I take the previous example and change it to this: “Contact David and schedule a discussion (Great Sense of Accomplishment)”, I would feel more motivated to get it done.

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“Drowning in Email – A Lifeline for Communications Overload”

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April 15, 2016