I learn something every day. Here’s a cool tip a colleague of mine shared internally today. When scheduling a meeting in Outlook, you can use natural language to quickly set the date.

For example, you could say “today” or “tomorrow” or “next week” or better yet “today + 4 days”. Here are some screenshots of it in action:

When you receive 200 emails per day, it can become challenging to keep straight which emails need a response, which ones you’ve already responded to and which ones are overdue for a follow-up response.

I work very disjointedly throughout the day. I may receive an email in the morning, but I may not respond until the afternoon. However, I don’t think this is a-typical. Making sure I stay on top of emails is a priority of mine.

[…]

To assist with this, I’ve developed what I’ll refer to as the “Email Triage System” for managing email. It follows a similar framework as an Emergency Room. Highest priority cases get bumped up to the front of the line and lower priority items wait. In the case of my emails, priority is based on the status of an email.

This system has effectively got me “caught up” on emails and within any given day I can respond to all high priority emails.

Check it out for yourself.  Feedback welcome!

http://erickraus.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Email-Triage-System1.docx