Everything else should be filed away, so as not to add clutter and distract from the essential items that require immediate responses. Here are some tips for how to organize your inbox:. I recommend skimming your inbox and identifying important senders and subjects to respond to first. Then, reply to emails in order of importance! Look for items that are meaningful to you as well as those that are time sensitive.
Here are a few strategies to help you prioritize:. Are there emails in your inbox that, despite good intentions, you know you never will read? Guess what? Use the following tips to unsubscribe from and delete all useless emails that are no longer important to you:. Maximize productivity by understanding what is important to you and your goals and tackling those items first.
Taking a more holistic approach to balance your time between emails and actual work will increase productivity. Try to fight the urge to answer emails as soon as they hit your inbox. This might seem like a quick tactic to keep your unread emails under control, but it takes the focus away from the task at hand and lowers your overall productivity. Before you do, give some thought to the type of priority items you need.
Do you want a numbering system such as 1, 2, and 3, or would you rather have meaningful text items, such as Alright to Ignore, Better Do Soon, and Catastrophe Awaits?
It's entirely up to you, but when going the text route, consider the alphabetical sort more on that later. For this example, we'll use a list of simple digits: 1, 2, 3, and so on. Once you have a list of priority items in mind, you're ready to add the custom field. In the Tasks window, select the view you want to modify; we'll work with Active.
If it's not available in the gallery, choose it from the Change View dropdown in the Current View group. With the Active view current, add the custom field as follows:. A simple click on the Task Priority header toggles the records between an ascending and descending sort. Currently, there's nothing to sort by, though. To assign priority levels to existing tasks, click inside the new field and enter a value.
Then, click the header to sort your tasks by your custom priority, as shown in Figure F. If you truly have 12 priority levels, you would expect 11 and 12 to sort to the bottom of an ascending list. Because we used a text data type when we added the custom field, 11 and 12 sort after 1 and before 2.
If you really have 12 levels, your custom field should be a numeric field--then it will sort as expected. I ran this example on purpose to show you what could happen. This sort is temporary. You can further modify your view to include a permanent sort by the custom field. To do so,. You can sort by other fields by clicking the header, but Outlook will sort by that field within the permanent priority groups. To sort by a series of custom priority levels, we added a custom field to the Active view and changed its grouping.
You could also copy the Active view and modify it if you don't want to permanently change the built-in view. Right now, the only way to add a custom priority value to a task is to add it after the fact using the view.
Greta is a compliance officer for a large financial firm. She uses Planner to track quarterly internal audits that are required to maintain regulatory compliance. For this process, she needs her team to collect information from sales and finance team members on a regular basis. To do this, she creates tasks to remind her team to collect information in their assigned areas. She can easily change task priorities as deadlines approach. Clayton is a software developer at an auto parts manufacturer.
He and his team use Planner to track planned software updates to user control panel displays. After a meeting with the product management team to learn about user feedback and expectations, Clayton needs the team to shift priorities for the next release.
To do this, he uses the filter option to communicate which tasks are most important to his team. Janice is the editor for a hospitality industry publication. She uses Planner to manage the editorial calendar for what articles are being developed and published each month. She also uses it to assign articles to writers. With the Group by Priorities feature, she can easily view all the urgent tasks that need to be completed—final edits, photo approvals, and so on, that need to happen by the publishing date.
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