Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook

Then, start reviewing each section of the list as I instructed above—check the High-priority section once an hour; Normal once a day; and Low once a week. Use this as your single place to look for everything you do. Once you start using this regularly, you’ll feel the stress draining off

five alternate ways to indicate hard deadlines; pick one that works best for you and each task. 1. If the deadline is today, just set the Priority field to High; after all, the definition of a High priority task in this system is that the task must be done today. If the deadline is in the future and you do not need to start work on it till that day

Review your Critical Now tasks about once an hour; review your Opportunity Now tasks once a day; and review your Over-the-Horizon tasks once a week.

I think 20 tasks is the ideal upper limit for an Opportunity Now list.

For example, if the action is required: Action Required: Update Sales Report If it is an optional action, or I want to soften the message, I use the word Requested or something even more innocuous: Action Requested: Feedback on Conference Your Response Appreciated: Survey Enclosed And if there is a deadline, I put it right in the title: Action Requ

One way to ensure that you are writing down the very next action on a stuck task is to ask yourself several times, “Is there anything else I need to do first?” If you find something, it becomes your very next action. This is also a useful exercise with new tasks, if you have time.

and enter the deadline day or date at the beginning of the text in the subject line, with the word DUE in all caps. So, for example, if a final year-end report is due Friday of this week, enter “DUE FRI Final Year-End Report.” If due a few weeks out, enter: “DUE Dec 26 Final Year-End Report” as shown below. Set the start date to today so you can st

The above three options, used together, are sufficient for the rare times that you need to set deadlines. But if you tend to have a lot of next-action tasks with deadlines, the above actions will start to feel like a lot of steps, particularly having to create duplicate tasks. In that case, Windows Outlook users should add the optional Deadline fie

task with the Start Date field set to the deadline, and the Priority field set to High. Here’s how this looks. First, as above, set a Normal priority task set to start today (Dec 19) with the Due date inserted in the text; see below: Then, set a High priority task to appear on the deadline (Dec 26) as shown here: This second task causes a task to p