Flag your emails!

Context

If you started your professional activity around the year 2000, you certainly remember the anxiety of receiving a new e-mail! Today, receiving dozens of emails a day has become a difficult habit to manage. I have some friends with unread notifications reaching over 500 messages. I confess that I cannot understand how we can consider ourselves efficient knowing that there are so many topics that we do not respond to!

Leaving e-mails unread won't solve the problem!

Today, I hope to show you how to better manage your mailbox and never forget a topic to deal with. And, yes, how you can integrate your e-mails with your task list :)

Searching for a solution

I assume! I am a fan of task management applications (and, by the way, GPS too!) and, for several years, I have tried most of the applications for task management available on the market.

But when related to never forgetting an e-mail, I always ended up (manually) rewriting the title of the e-mail as the description on my to-do list and matching it (manually) with my e-mail list. It was always a time-consuming and out-of-sync activity that I am sure annoys everyone! After some time, I discovered software that allowed me to forward the e-mail message to a specific e-mail (provided by the company that developed the application), and the task was automatically created. This automation improved a lot but... even so, the tasks were left with garbage (due to forward action) and, as far as security is concerned, I was sending messages to an email server that I was not aware of their rules about privacy and ownership!

When I discovered that it was possible to do it so "transparently" in Microsoft Outlook, I couldn't believe it! Check out the next sub-section.

E-mails "becoming" tasks?!

The principle is not to transform emails into tasks but, rather, for e-mails to be integrated into our to-do list.

Let's imagine that we receive an e-mail, like the one in the image below (in which the client requests a report by the end of next week). When we receive an e-mail, we might not intend to stop what we are doing and answer it, but it is important that we do something so that we don't forget.

And here is the golden functionality of Microsoft Outlook! We can click on the red flag (as shown in the image below) and mention that we want to plan to deliver the topics of this e-mail for the following week, for example. You can choose to be "notified" today, tomorrow, next week, or a specific day.

A simple step like the one presented above and, from that moment on, the e-mail will appear on your to-do list (as if it were a task)! Before we continue, let me introduce the notation Microsoft Outlook will use to represent the possible types of tasks:

In the image below, I present the to-do list (available on the View tab which was described in my second post) and, in red circle number 1, you will be able to check the different types of tasks. And, for the email we have just considered, no icon to classify appears, as expected. Another notable feature is shown in red circle number 2: double-clicking on the task list item (and due to the fact that it is an e-mail type) automatically opens the associated e-mail. This is a feature that gives us direct access to information and allows us to speed up our daily working method (you don't have to search anymore!).

And now, the emails are visible on your to-do list and you can carry out other actions, like planning (for example) as mentioned in my fourth post!

I think it also became clear what the type option might give you (in the View tab described in my second post). In the image below, when you click on the option indicated in red circle number 1, the to-do list will be grouped according to two main types: Messages (e-mails) and Tasks. By clicking on the red circle option number 2, you will be able to view your task list grouped by the selected type.

Next post

In this post, I have focused on flagging your e-mails which allow them to appear on your task list. And, then, you can include them in your planning like presented before. It "works" like a task!

For me, this is the golden functionality when working with e-mails and tasks in Microsoft Outlook, due to the complete integration which promotes.

In the next post, I will share some practical advice on how to read and flag your e-mails and ensure that you have time to perform it well. The focus will be on finding a balance between reading e-mails and executing tasks :)

Feel free to leave some comments.

Stay tuned!