This week, I’m continuing my series of Tuesday TechTips related to setting up my new laptop at ServiceNow with the hope that as I share how I am productive, it will help you out as well. This week, I’m going to introduce you to Outlook Quick Steps. This referenced support article from Microsoft walks you through the default Quick Steps that come with Outlook and how to set up new Quick Steps. In this post, I’m going to share what I use for Quick Steps as well as some tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way.
To start, here’s a graphic showing my current Quick Steps as well as the configuration of one of them.
I use a very simple folder system in Outlook. My main folders are:
- Inbox – Items only live for a short time in my inbox. I subscribe to the inbox zero philosophy of inbox management but do not get overly zealous about it.
- Calendar Folders – I have 3 folders set up with rules set up to filter meeting invite responses into Accept, Tentative, & Declined folders so I can see very quickly what people have responded.
- Purgatory – This is where emails go to live while there is an active task in my to-do list application that needs to hang around until the task is done. I keep the contents of this folder to an absolute minimum.
- Newsletters – This folder is used for regularly occurring internal newsletters that occur. This folder came about because I found myself regularly referring to newsletters with other employees and needing a way to quickly find them so I could pass them along highlighting specific sections because, in my experience, most people do not read internal newsletters to the degree you wish they would.
- Travel & Expense – I use this folder for digital receipts that need to be included in expense reports that have not been filed yet. When the associated expense report is filed, the items in this folder get deleted.
- __Archive – This is my catch-all folder. I have found throughout the years that simplicity is best. I have seen people who have extensive & elaborate folder/tagging systems (and I’ve been that person in the past) but the tools that are available now in searching and conversation views etcetera make it such that you only need a handful of folders with one main catch-all folder. I turn on conversation view for all of my folders which allows me to see all emails in a chain in my inbox regardless of which folder they’re in as well as the search capabilities have greatly improved over the years.
When it comes to Quick Steps, I recommend the following:
- Stick to nine or less for a reason I will explain in the next bullet.
- Ensure that each Quick Steps is assigned a shortcut key (CTRL+SHIFT+1-9 are the only available shortcut keys. This is the reason I recommend only 9 Quick Steps.
- With the advent of Microsoft To-Do, Outlook tasks are finally usable so I would advise one of your Quick Steps to be assigned to creating a task from the selected email. The basic ad talk function well as the task to your main tasks list in To-Do, but if you want, you can move it to another list from the To-Do app.
Hopefully, this post was helpful. If you have any questions, hit me up on your favorite social network.