These still apply to today’s world but have been lost in the flurry of digital organizing. "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 fix MFA prompts not working 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.

How can I manage complicated tasks?

Fortunately, with Outlook, you can view multiple accounts simultaneously. In addition to your work email account (Exchange Server), you can add other accounts such as Outlook.com or Gmail to the same profile in Outlook. As you go through your task list and your calendar, do similar tasks together.

I have 10 minutes: What should I read first in my Inbox?

• If your corporate policy dictates that you have multiple folders for each type of item, follow that policy.
• Search folders are useful for gathering information from across different mail and RSS folders.
• You can’t read every message you receive — nor should you try to.
• The tool that you use to collaborate during a meeting depends on the location and access of your participants.
• Reviewing your past week and upcoming week is also a useful way to help you prepare for a weekly meeting with your manager or help you prepare a status email message.

To do this, select the Recurrence button and change the end date. If you find that you are often performing searches across your whole mailbox, you can set the default search scope to always search across all folders by going to the Backstage view. All search terms are additive, so if you want to find a message from someone with attachments, select the commands on the ribbon (From, Has Attachments) to build your search.

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Messages to a Contact Group that only occasionally contain useful or interesting content, regardless of frequency, should have a rule and a folder. It’s a best practice to have a central repository for your messages, so that you can refer to them after diagnose Office activation conflicts you've "dealt" with them. The Navigation Pane folder list should be reserved for folders you use often. If it's filled with folders you don't even recognize, move all mail into the reference folder and delete your existing folders.

Advanced: How do I create a Search Folder for email messages?

To apply the "Work Less" theory, have Outlook automatically file an email. Then you can read them all at one time without distraction. If you just want to remember a few related tasks, list them in modern authentication troubleshooting the body of the task. If you have more than 20 items in your Inbox, process the last week of messages and then select the remaining messages and move them to your 1-Reference folder.

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That's not to say that there isn't a need for browsing through messages that are all on a particular topic or project. Outlook provides better tools — such as categories and search folders — so you can search effectively. By viewing your messages in conversation view, you can easily see which conversations have had the most back-and-forth discussion. In those cases, you might want to read and respond to only the last message in the conversation.



For example, there might be a lengthy series of messages where the last one simply states, "Thanks, that answers my question," so you can just delete the whole conversation. Sometimes you can’t find a message by only searching in your reference folder alone — it could be a message that you sent or it could have been misfiled. In these cases, start by searching in any folder (Inbox, 1-Reference, etc.), then select the drop down menu from the search box, and then select Current Mailbox. The reality is that if you have a day filled with meetings, you have less time to complete tasks and write messages, so move tasks to other days. The goal of organizing your Outlook is to reduce the amount of unnecessary "noise" in your Inbox and to make the most important items bubble to the top.