Is your corporation or organization interested in processing e-mail much, much faster?

I’m Taco Oosterkamp and I love showing people how Outlook can be turned into a powerful tool, instead of one of the applications that drains your energy. (Even Microsoft employees buy my book to supercharge their e-mail!)

In the past few years I have already trained thousands of people to implement a few clear and easy steps to get their inbox to empty each and every day. I love to travel around the world and would like to hear from you if your organization could use a serious boost in this area.

Because I’m committed to effectiveness, I normally provide my services this way:

• I do a live session of 1 to 2 hours in which I explain and demonstrate what you need to do in Outlook to get a much better overview and work much faster in Outlook. Minimum attendance is 50 people, maximum attendance has never been an issue. If you want - you can book me for a football stadium
• You get a license to use a small software tool that sets up the extra folders, buttons and shortcuts that I explain during my session. This saves the attendees about an hour per person. It has to run just once, it is not a plug-in for Outlook. And if you don’t want to use it that is fine, too!
• A copy of my book ‘Each Day Empty’ for each attendee. This explains in clear English what I demonstrated during the live session.
• A mini course by e-mail for each attendee. This repeats the information in a low-key style, so it won’t be forgotten.

Based on the size of your organization and the physical location for the live session we can offer you this gigantic boost in e-mail productivity for a very affordable price per person.

Please contact my manager Eva de Vries at eva@meereffect.nl for a proposal or to schedule a consultation.

Processing e-mail can take a lot of time. And while writing responses may account for most of the time and effort, if you can speed up reading new e-mails, that could help a lot too.

Minimizing the amount of keystrokes and clicks that I need to do my work has always been a great passion of me. One of the Outlook features that really helps here is the Reading Pane. You can display it via the main menu: View | Reading Pane | Right.

When the Reading Pane is visible, you can see the contents of the currently selected e-mail, without having to open it by hand. This removes a little bit of hassle for each e-mail, which does count up when you receive tens of hundreds of e-mails each day.

Most people that I train or coach are a bit afraid of the Reading Pane, as there have been warnings of virus activity. However, in new versions this has been fixed. The help file for Outlook 2007 states: "You can view messages safely in the Reading Pane. Potentially malicious scripts or attachments are not activated or opened automatically in the Reading Pane."

Just try how it works for you.

I’m really enjoying the GTD Summit in sunny California. And it seems I’m not the only one. The atmosphere is great, it’s real nice to meet some people in person after reading their stories or exchanging e-mails.

This is a bunch of people who really get things done. Well, except for one thing: why do I see people using the mouse to move e-mails to another folder? I don’t get it.

Outlook has great support for keyboard shortcuts and if you remember just four of them, you can archive your e-mails 40% faster! This does count, especially when you want to get your inbox to empty every day.

To copy or move an e-mail to a different folder, use Ctrl+Shift+Y and Ctrl+Shift+V. These shortcut keys can copy and move any Outlook item to another folder, so if you want to copy an e-mail to your calender you can use Ctrl+Shift+Y too. *)

To close an item, use Alt+S. This is useful after copying an e-mail to your tasks list for instance. Outlook will show you the new task and Alt+S (Save and Close) makes it quite easy to finish working on that task again.

And finally, to go to a different folder, just press Ctrl+Y. Outlook will display the ‘Go to Folder’ dialog. In this dialog you can select another folder using the cursor keys, or by typing the name of the folder on the keyboard. If you have selected the correct folder, press Enter to go to that folder.

Enjoy your new speed.

*) If you think Ctrl+Shift+Y and Ctrl+Shift+V is too difficult to use in real life, check out my e-book ‘Each Day Empty’. In this book you’ll learn how to set up Outlook for total productivity, which includes being able to use Alt+1 and Alt+2 instead of the more difficult standard Outlook shortcut keys for copying and moving e-mails.

Right now I’m enjoying the sunshine and a jetlag in San Francisco. Tonight the first GTD Summit ever will open with a reception and jazz music. This summit will certainly be a real fun place to meet new people, talk to people that up until now are only names and e-mail addresses to me and enjoy listening to great ideas about Getting Things Done.

If you’re there and you want to meet to talk about Outlook, Fingertips or anything else: I’m easily recognizable being just over 2 meters tall (6,5 feet). I will probably hang around with Martijn Aslander, Frank Meeuwsen, Elise de Bres and last but not least Marleen Kruyswijk.

If you keep your addresslist in Outlook, it would be mighty useful to be able to find a contact as quickly as possible. If only to look up a phonenumber or an address.

The standard button bar has a text field to do just that: ‘Search address books’.

Unfortunately, many people use their mouse to put the cursor in that edit box, which makes it quite a bit slower than if you could use a shortcut key to access this functionality. And Outlook doesn’t make it real clear what the shortcut key is. I’ll tell you: it’s F11.

If you press F11 in the Outlook main screen, you can then type in a few characters (at least three) of the name you’re looking for.

Then press the Enter key to start the search. If Outlook finds just one contact, it will immediately display the contact. If it finds multiple contacts, it will display a simple ‘Choose Contact’ dialog in which you can select the contact that you want.

You could also press F11 and then press F4 (or Alt+ArrowDown). This will open a list with the most recently searched for contacts.

Using more of the keyboard is the way to go if you value performance. If you’ve read my Each Day Empty eBook (I renamed it last week from ‘The Happy Outlook Book’ as some thought this was a confusing title), you know that I consider using keyboard shortcuts to be one of the most important strategies to optimize your use of Microsoft Outlook.

Where Getting Things Done gives most of the mental strategies needed to quickly process incoming e-mails, the process is made much more powerful and quick when adding some shortcut keys to your repertoire.

Fortunately, Outlook has lots of shortcut keys that you can take advantage of. As soon as you’re getting used to keep the mouse motionless on your desk, you’ll start to find situations where you’d like to use the keyboard.

From the Reading Pane / Preview Window

Like when you need to save one or more attachments from an incoming e-mail. Lot’s of people that we train or coach use the mouse for saving attachments, but even that can be tackled with keys only.

1. Open your inbox and display an e-mail with attachments in the Reading Pane in Outlook (View | Reading Pane | Right).
2. Press Alt+F, N to open the Save Attachments menu item from the main menu.

   

3. Select the attachment that you want to save, then press Enter to specify the location and filename for that file.

   

4. Or choose ‘All Attachments…’ and press Enter to specify the folder where you want to store all attachments for this e-mail. The original filenames will be used to store them in the folder you specify.

From an open e-mail

Some people open each e-mail to process it. That is quite a bit slower, but if you prefer to open each e-mail when processing it, saving all attachments with the keyboard is a bit more difficult, but can still be done.

1. Open an e-mail with attachments by pressing Enter.
2. Press Alt+H to select the first Tab on the Ribbon (Home).
3. Press ‘X’ to select the button ‘Other Actions’.
4. Press ‘N’ to select the ‘Save Attachments’ item.
5. Press Enter to select the dialog in which you can select which attachments you want to save.
6. Specify the location of the folder in which you want to save these attachments.

If you open an e-mail and want to save just one attachment, you can also press Shift-Tab, the press the Right cursor key and finally press the context menu key to open the menu which allows you to save the attachment.

Save time

Once you’ve trained your fingers to use the keyboard for saving attachments, this may save you 40% of the time needed to save an attachment. And apart from saving the time, it will also help you to keep focused on your work instead of having to invest the eye-hand coördination effort that using the mouse needs.

The easier you make it for yourself to perform each individual step of processing e-mail, the greater your chance that your inbox will be empty each day. At least once every day.

In the Each Day Empty eBook I describe how you can quickly get your inbox to empty each day. But after a summer holiday you may be in for some serious help to attack your inbox when you arrive at the office again. My own Outlook started to download 3200 mails when I returned – and I was glad that I already knew some of the following tips.

1. Learn how to sort and group e-mails in your mail reader. In Outlook you could use the View | Arrange By item in the main menu.
2. Sort all mails in your inbox by Subject. A lot of the spam that got through your spamfilter will be grouped together now. You can quickly remove all mails starting with Cyrillic symbols (unless you happen to live in Russia). Also all spam that happens to have the same subject over and over again can easily be spotted.
3. Then sort all your mails by the To field. This may not be relevant to everyone, but I still get e-mails (especially spam) that was sent to another e-mail address than my own addresses. Sorting this way I can remove these messages easily.
4. Now sort the remaining e-mails by From and Date. This way you will group all mails that came from each specific sender – and in the order that they were sent. Your mileage may vary, but I tend to quickly scan through all mails starting with the oldest one. But I don’t reply to any of the mails yet. This way I can read up on the developments, better understand my customers and employees, and still prevent myself from replying to something which is changed or revoked in a newer e-mail.
5. After taking these steps, I’m up-to-date again. I’m aware of current issues, I know whether there are serious problems that need my attention and I know which e-mails I’m going to want to answer first of all.

Even before I go on vacation, I already think about the first days when I’m back in the office. In my out-of-office autoreply I do mention the date that I think I will be answering e-mails again - and it is several days after I return from vacation. This way I prevent having to tackle my e-mail straight away and in an ‘urgent’ mood, just as I’m feeling rested and relaxed from my vacation.

Fortunately, once I’m up-to-date again it’s quite easy to keep my inbox empty each day for the rest of the year.

Once you start using Outlook as your trusted system, you run into a few problems immediately. One of them is the fact that adding tasks to Outlook folders can take quite a few steps to accomplish. Time better spent on more satisfying or creative tasks. Enter Fingertips.

Throughout almost all of Outlook you can press Ctrl+Shift+K to create a new task item in the default tasks folder. This works pretty good, but only for the default tasks folder, not for your Someday/Maybe and Waiting For folders. And it still requires you to start Outlook or switch your focus to Outlook.

For frequent users of the task list functionality in Outlook, using Fingertips could be a great idea. With Fingertips you can easily add tasks from anywhere in Windows to any tasklist in Outlook. And you can create custom commands to add tasks with specific categories or boilerplate text.

Open Fingertips command window

Once you have downloaded and installed Fingertips, you can open the Fingertips command window from anywhere in Windows to add a task to Outlook, start an application or surf to a favorite website.

Press Ctrl+Grave (`) to open the Fingertips command window

The Grave is probably located at the top-left side of the keyboard, or left to the spacebar. Pressing this key combination should display the Fingertips command window. In the options dialog of Fingertips, you can set this key combination to another combination if you prefer to do so.

Type the "na" command and the subject for the task

Type na, a space and the description of the task that you want to add to Outlook

"na" is the default Fingertips command to add a Next Action to the default task list in Outlook. Any text that you type after the default command and a space will be used for the subject of the task. Don’t use comma’s right away, as they are used by Fingertips to separate parameters for tasks.

Press Enter, or add a semicolon

Press Enter, or add a semicolon ( ; ) first, if you don’t want to see the Task Item itself

After pressing the Enter key, Fingertips will add the task to Outlook and display the Task Item for you to add any other information, set categories or modify the subject. If Outlook isn’t running yet, Fingertips will start Outlook first.

If you want to add a task to Outlook without extra information, you can close the command line with a semicolon ( ; ). Fingertips will then just add the task to Outlook, without displaying the Task Item to you first.

Creating custom commands in Fingertips

Once you get the hang of it, you can press the "Edit" or "New" button at the bottom right corner of the Fingertips command window to open the Options Dialog. In this dialog you can modify commands, copy them or create new commands.

As far as I know, using Fingertips is the fastest and easiest way to add tasks to Outlook. What are you waiting for?

Today Gina Trapani wrote two articles about two of my projects on Lifehacker.com, the premier website with lifehacking tips and tricks.

The first article is about Fingertips, a free utility that enables you to quickly add items to any list in Outlook. I developed it to make it real easy to use Outlook as my trusted system. I will definitely write more about Fingertips on this website.

The other article is about The Happy Outlook Book (now renamed to The Each Day Empty eBook), the book that I wrote about using Getting Things Done in Outlook.

Or as Gina Trapani says:

“For more GTD-inspired Outlook productivity strategies like this one,
check out the Happy Outlook Book e-book,
my source for this excellent Move and Copy toolbar tip.”

Thanks Gina!

Did you know? Since Outlook 2007 you can hide or display the Navigation Pane (at the left side of the screen) by clicking Alt+F1.

Use Alt + F2 to toggle the display of the To-Do Bar at the right side of the screen.

Ctrl + F1 hides or displays the Ribbon, this doesn’t work in the main Outlook window, but it can help to free up some space when editing a Task Item or other item.