10 Outlook Hacks, Outlook Tips and Tricks to Improve Productivity and Time Management

Tip 1) Improve productivity – turn OFF notifications

This may seem counter intuitive, but turning off notifications will actually improve your productivity. Notifications are distractions, they kill your productivity by taking your mind off what you are doing, and sap time when you restart what you were previously doing.

It depends on your role at work, but if you can turn notifications off and can instead look at your email, chat or other systems at regular intervals, your productivity and effectiveness will improve.

Tip 2) Improve your time management – use Tasks and the To-Do list

Most of use a to-do list in some form or another to manage our time, and there are many ways to do this in Outlook.

From research we undertook, we found that 23% of respondents use their calendar as a to-do list, 13% use their inbox, 38% use an actual to-do list. As Microsoft Outlook has all of these functions, at least 74% of us can use Outlook for time management.

Tip 3) Stay on top of your daily Tasks – display your To-Do list in your Inbox

In a busy working environment, it is easy to get distracted, overlook Tasks and fall behind. A good way to avoid this is to make your To-do list visible in your Inbox:

Tip 4) Add your To-Do list to your Calendar

Tip 5) Display a daily To-Do list on each date in your Calendar

This is actually very handy if you use start or end dates and you should at least try it:

You’ll now see a daily task list at the bottom of each day. As a default, the Daily Task List arranges tasks by Due Date.

This might be fine for you, but if you have a Task which is due next Monday, you won’t see it until you get into next week. When using the daily task list and the full to do list, it can be more helpful to arrange daily Tasks by start date. To change the this:

Tip 7) Turn emails into To-Do list items

Tasks often start from emails that you receive, and when they do, they can be quickly turned into Tasks, which is much easier than setting them up manually.

It is all too easy to be interrupted by emails and get side tracked.

Now we can see how these tips work together. If you turn off email notifications (as we showed in 1 above), but check your emails every hour or so, you can review them, and turn important ones into Tasks.

By implementing tips 3, 4 & 5, your tasks are visible from your Inbox and calendar, so you can more easily review your Tasks to make sure you focus on the most important and urgent items.

Try it! If you’ve turned your task pane in emails on already, when you click on the flag the email is flagged as a follow up item and added to your to-do list. If you right mouse click in the flag column, you can choose other follow up dates.

Tip 8) Turn emails into follow-up actions in your calendar

Sometimes rather than creating an important follow up as a Task, it may be best to schedule it as an actual appointment. This could be a follow up call, a meeting, or something that you need to do which needs to occur at a specific date and time. In this case create it as an Outlook appointment.

Try It Now! Turn an email into a Task and schedule it as an appointment:

Drag the email onto the Calendar icon in the left menu (or bottom menu for older versions) . In a few seconds a new appointment window with the email as the body text will load. Specify the follow-up date and time, then click Save & Close.

Emails can be turned into tasks and appointments, and when you do, the email shows the following message in it’s heading to show that this email appears in both your calendar and your To-Do list.

Tip 9) Improve your Time Management use Outlook

Research shows that around 90% of us use some of to-do list at work. We’ve shown you the mechanics of how to make your To-Do list visible in your Inbox and Calendar. Additionally, we’ve shown you how to quickly and easily turn emails into Tasks and appointments. Now it’s time to look at how you can use these tools to help you become more effective and productive, by using Outlook as a time management system.

There are many Time Management techniques (time blocking, eisenhower matrix, pomodoro, eat the frog and more). Time blocking can be used with the Outlook calendar, but the Eisenhower matrix works really well with your Inbox and.

What is the Eisenhower Time Management Matrix?

The idea of the Eisenhower Matrix is that by categorizing your tasks by importance and urgency, you can more easily focus on the priority items, and not get held back on less important or urgent items.

Tip 10) Use your Scheduled Tasks in Time Tracking

If you need to track the time you spend at work, you can use our time tracking Outlook app. This Outlook hack turns appointments into timesheets and gives you an Outlook time tracking system.

If you give the Eisenhower Matrix a try, you’ll see that your quadrant 2 items  (important but not urgent items) flow directly into your timesheet, but you can also track time for non appointment or task items directly.

By turning appointments into timesheets, Timewatch’s Outlook time tracking system saves people hours each week. It works with all versions of Outlook, and there is a plugin for Outlook  for Windows that adds this functionality inside Outlook so you can track time without ever leaving Outlook.