Processing and Organizing Your E-Mail in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007

What Changes Will You Make?

Take a moment to reflect on what changes you’ll make as a result of reading the topics in this chapter:

• Using the E-Mail PASS Model to write more meaningful e-mail communications

• Properly using the To, Cc, Bcc, and Subject lines

• Using the Four Ds for Decision Making

• Reducing volume

• Scheduling e-mail processing time

In the To-Do List in Outlook, open the IMPROVING PRODUCTIVITY task that you created in Chapter 4, and under the heading “Processing and Organizing” enter the specific actions that you want to do to support the completion of the Processing and Organizing Phase. For example, Carol’s choices are listed in Figure 11-17.

Figure 11-17. Keeping track of the changes you’ll make.

After you’ve recorded these changes, close the Task back into Categories: (none). You’ll refer to it again at the end of the Prioritizing and Planning Phase.

• Start with doing what’s necessary; then do what’s possible, and suddenly, you are doing the impossible.

• —Saint Francis of Assisi

For inspiration, here are few examples of what our clients have written:

• “Use the Delete key!”

• “Handle e-mail in less than two minutes.”

• “Schedule uninterrupted time to process e-mail.”

• “Be way more careful about how I use the Cc line.”

• “Meet with my team to clarify e-mail standards and reinforce them.”

• “Save attachments into My Documents instead of my Personal Folders E-mail Reference System.”

• “If I can do it in less than two minutes, do it.”

• “Scan long messages in less than two minutes to establish if I really need to read them.”

• “Never close an e-mail message back into the Inbox. Make a decision and do something with it.”

• “Talk to my team about how we Cc so that I can reduce my e-mail volume.”

• “Use dragging to defer tasks into the SNA categories.”

• “Don’t save e-mail messages that don’t relate to my Meaningful Objectives.”