If you are taking notes or minutes for the meeting, you can also use OneNote to insert meeting details from Outlook into click through the next article your notes. After the meeting, you can send your notes to the attendees as a message. If you want to collaborate in a more ad hoc fashion, you can use OneNote to take notes together in a single notebook.

• It’s a best practice to have a central repository for your messages, so that you can refer to them after you've "dealt" with them.
• Treat these streams of information much as you would a large newspaper — there might be a useful or interesting article, but reading the whole paper would take considerable time.
• Sometimes you receive a message that is really meant for someone else to deal with.
• Otherwise, consider using an online meeting app such as Microsoft Teams or meeting by phone.
• Collapse the top-level Contact Group folder so that you aren’t distracted by the unread messages in the folders beneath it.
• This becomes even more complicated if there is more than one appropriate folder per message.
• Rather than using Bcc to inform a third party of an issue, forward the message after you send it.

Delete it

Your calendar should be treated as your real plan for your time — if you have scheduled it, then that is what you are committed to doing at that time. After you finish processing your messages, you should have a clean Inbox and can switch your focus to your calendar and tasks. If you find that you are repeatedly applying the same categories and flags, create a new Quick Step that flags, categorizes, and files.

Which Contact Groups should go to a folder instead of my Inbox?

Sometimes you receive a message that you don’t need to act upon, but which you might need at a future date. File these messages in your reference folder (1-Reference) by selecting your Reference Quick Step. Adding a category will make the clear Outlook credentials manager message easier to find later if you need it (for example, @Project).

Daily review: Managing your time and tasks

"Working less" means you touch each piece of correspondence one time only. Whether it’s an actual paper envelope with a letter or whether it’s an email. "Correspondence" means Incoming Information, not necessarily "follow-up tasks". In this article, we’ll give you some of the best Outlook hacks for digital office management, along with some awesome Outlook tips and tricks featured in the program. I told my boss I'd like to give a (voluntary) company-wide training in something someday as a self-development goal and he suggested Outlook/inbox management. I don't manage his inbox but I did help him get the Stack method set up and he's blown away by how awesome it is, so now thinks I'm an Outlook wizard.

When to create a Contact Group in Outlook

Sometimes you receive a message that is really meant for someone else to deal with. In these cases, reply and include the person you're delegating the message to on the To line. If you find you're doing this often, consider creating a Quick Step that replies and adds the delegated person to the To line. If you need it as reference (even if you have decided to defer it), move it into your reference folder. The goal is to reduce the number of times you touch each message. Once you set up your system, you are ready to begin managing incoming messages.

Repair Outlook OST File Not Working in Office 365 – Complete Fix (

You might not need to share your calendar, because everyone in your organization can see when you are free or busy but not necessarily see the content or subject of the meetings and appointments. However, you can easily share your calendar with your team if you want them to be able to see all of your meetings and appointments. If you are collaborating with other people or just need more room for your thoughts, consider using a OneNote notebook, which can be shared either through a SharePoint site or on a local server. OneNote provides FixTechGuide Office 365 troubleshooting a richer note-taking experience than Outlook tasks. If you have a message you want to discuss at a meeting, flag that message for the day of the meeting and mark it with the @Meeting category.

View the calendar and inbox side by side

For example, many messages can be responded to in two minutes or less. But if a message takes longer than two minutes to deal with, defer it. To get a sense of what two minutes feels like, try timing yourself. If you never want to receive another message as part of this conversation, ignore it.



Some people try to use the read and unread states to indicate whether a message is new or a reference item. Inevitably, messages will be reread, and the mental tax of figuring out what you need to do will be paid again. A far more efficient Inbox plan is to go through your messages and decide what to do with each one. Spend 20 minutes in the morning going through your messages, and then turn your attention to doing a daily review of your task list.