What do you think? Can you ignore your email half a day to focus on your work, or is your email your work? I think the type of position we have in a company determines how we process email. If you’re in a support or customer service role, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to turn off Outlook for a specified period of time. However, if you have a deadline and really need to focus, or your position has more of a thought/long range planning emphasis, it probably makes sense to not let incoming email distract you.

Whatever your role, you may benefit from the three Outlook tips featured this week.They are:

1. Effective ways to sort and organize your mail.
2. Take an email item and make it a calendar or contact item.
3. Fast searches to quickly find what you need.

Outlook Message Sorting

Check out your ‘View’ setting in Outlook. This is a quick way to cycle through all the choices available to you. The default is date with the newest on top. But check out the other options. Are you looking for something with an attachment – click on that. Have you ever tried out conversation view. I’ve found this one useful when needing to find  and follow a thread of conversation. This feature is in Outlook 2003 and later. With Outlook 2010, there is a feature that will ‘clean up’ duplicate conversations, which is nice.

Below are links to ways to change how messages are grouped in Outlook. The defaults are listed in the links. There are instructions for making your own groups.

• In Outlook 2010
• In Outlook 2007
• In Outlook 2003

To be more productive in your email, I find it’s helpful to create folders. Then when items come in, I can file them in their proper folder. You may want to make your folders topic based. Studies show that most email is for reference, so you may want to have folders to file this material in by topic or by who it’s from. The method just depends on the way you think is effective. Someone else may have a totally different system, but it works for them.

Perhaps flagging or categorizing mail (using color) works best for you. Take a little time to set up your perfect system and then tweak it from time to time.

Take an email item and make it a Calendar, Task or Contact

If you’re like most people, you get many items via email that need to go to either your calendar, a task to be done or you’d like to add the sender to your contacts. I used to copy and paste or just open up my calendar and type things in from the email. Then I discovered drag and drop.

Use drag and drop  to take an email and put it in your Calendar, Tasks or Contacts! If you want to put an email item on your calendar, Left-click and drag the item down to your calendar icon (see below). If you have more than one calendar, the icon will expand to show all your calendars and you can drag it on to the one you want. Then an appointment box will open up (look on your task bar for it). You will have to fill in the time and date details, but the body of the email will be in the appointment.
The same works for making an email into a task or contact. This is a great time saver.

Fast searches to quickly find what you need

Have you ever noticed the ‘Search Folders’ folder? It’s the last folder in the illustration below. It can become a powerful tool and timesaver for you. Use it to aggregate and/or sort your mail into specific categories. You can see below I’ve named a search folder ‘for follow up’. This contains all the emails I’ve flagged for follow up. Now they’re all in one place and I can quickly go to that folder to quickly check items needing attention.

If you have a team member(s) you collaborate with, you can set up a folder to capture all emails from people you designate. This can save you a lot of time and scrolling. You can also move your search folder up in the folder list. Simply right-click on it and follow the prompts to move it so it’s more in your line of sight.

Summary – Take Action!

Are you a ‘zero inbox’ person? I must confess I’m not. I’m one of those people who use Outlook as a repository of information, reference and referral. In my many years as an admin, I’ve had to go back and search for documentation to prove that yes, indeed, you did get an email on this and here it is! The Outlook search is powerful and effective for my needs and with the sorting features Outlook offers, I don’t see a need to change. I do need to go through and eliminate the junk I don’t need anymore and again, the sorting features in Outlook can quickly help me accomplish that.

What about you? Do you need help with your inbox or some organization tips? Perhaps I can help. Feel free to contact me via email, twitter or phone.

There are some pretty logical and sensible tips for doing this. Of course, if you have a public presence, you’ll not want to use your true birthdate and other easy-to-find-out-facts on-line.Even if you’re not a ‘celebrity’, it might be wise to pick a fake birthdate and birthplace for many things web-related.

Gmail is the only web-based email provider (I believe), that will allow secure (or https) sign-ins. This is a great benefit for those of us who want to check email while traveling, in a coffee shop, etc. Probably not many of us stop to think that when we’re on our wireless laptops in a coffee shop, and decide to login to our Yahoo, or other web-based email, that there is a chance that our password could be hijacked by someone lurking on the wireless network. Since there is no security on an open network, everything is wide open and those with the know-how can intercept our data.

In addition to offering the https login, Gmail gives us the added security of choosing our own security questions. Take advantage of this feature.

Enabling https in Gmail is a simple click. Login to Gmail and click ‘Settings’. Scroll down to the bottom and click the “Always Use Https” radio button. Save your changes and from now on, wherever you login, your password will be encrypted.

After you do this, you’ll notice the Google mail notifier has stopped working. (The notifier is the mail icon that appears in your system tray when new email comes in.) You can fix this two ways. You can do a manual registry hack, or you can download the Google registry hack that will automatically do this for you. Google conveniently provides an uninstall to the hack, should you later change your mind.

I recently learned that PayPal is offering a valuable and FREE service for those of us who are wary of giving up our credit card information when making an on-line purchase. Now, you can use PayPal’s handy Secure Card plug-in–it’s a small download and install. After installation, you’ll see a PayPal icon in your browser tool bar. If you’re at a site and you’ve found a really great deal on something, but you’ve never shopped there before, use PayPal’s plug-in. It will generate for you a one-time credit card number to pay for the purchase. This way, your own credit card is never displayed and you are 100% protected by PayPal from an unauthorized purchase.

The nitty gritty:

• this plug-in can be used ONLY with sites that accept MasterCard
• there is a limit of $1,000 per day
• you pay for your purchase with your PayPal balance, if that balance is zero, the secondary source is usually your bank account. If I’m a first-time buyer at a website, I don’t mind giving up my frequent flier miles and a 30-day grace period before paying my credit card bill.

Some handy features:

• Auto-fill – the on-line forms can be filled out for you
• On-line history and receipts of your purchases
• Alerts from PayPal if you come upon a fraudulent website
• You can use a number multiple times at the same website

Below is a screenshot from the website that shows purchase history.

Generate new cards or view old cards

1 This notifier appears when you’re shopping.

2 Use the plug-in to see all the Secure Cards you’ve generated. You can:

• Generate new cards.
• Change expiration dates.
• Close cards.

There are several credit card companies that will issue you a single-use number – Citibank and Discover are two of them. Contact your credit card company to see if they might offer this service. It’s to their advantage to offer something like this. Neither the banks or we want to go through the hassle of cleaning up the mess of someone stealing our credit card numbers. You can read about it here.