Time management using Outlook (1-day)

Target Audience

Within the wide range of available applications, Outlook remains a particularly valuable solution when it comes to your personal organization of exchanging messages and information while keeping track of appointments and assignments. This workshop aims at co-workers who want to get more out of their e-mail-programme than just sending and receiving messages and wish to go beyond the more commonly known or used features.

Objectives

During the workshop we address specifically those methods and techniques that help us manage the excess of e-mails, the need to be available for others and yet meet our deadlines so that we can stay more focused and use our time more wisely.

- to find out how to organize categories, use the calendar for your proper planning instead of simply accepting meeting requests, create your own item view layout or colour e-mail messages according to sender, importance or urgency.
- to keep the overview, schedule and follow-up actions, and honour assignments

Duration

This workshop takes one day of 6 hours of training.

Introduction: time management = attention management

The present-day working environment is characterized by a profusion of information: too much, too fast and often spread over several systems so that the focus gets lost. Recent understanding of workflow and of the way the human brain operates forms the guideline in our search for a more productive use of this organization and communication tool.

Contacts

- Migrate contacts from and to other applications

- Organizing your contact list

- Share your contacts with colleagues

- Manage mailing lists

E-mail management

- Exploring the power of the search function

- Organize e-mails using categories, rules & quick steps

- Follow-up e-mails properly

- Manage group discussions

- Advanced features of the out-of-office assistant

- Using template messages and a library of standard paragraphs

- Sharing a mailbox with colleagues

Calendar management

- Integrate e-mail and calendar applications

- The 'visually correct' calendar view

- The ideal daily/weekly schedule

- Sharing calendars

- Managing group calendars

Task list and To-Do-list

- Delegate and follow-up tasks

- Follow-up projects using Outlook

- Different views to organize your task lists

- Organize the task list using colours

- How to implement Agile & Scrum in Outlook