I have posted over the last few weeks a number of ways in which we can reconfigure Outlook to better utilise it as a time management tool, rather than just an email client. The first article looked at altering, well, what you look at when Outlook is opened – how to switch from the Inbox displaying as your first screen (new tasks to deal with) to the Calendar (ie. the to-do list you already have waiting for you).
The second article covered Tasks in more depth – in particular how to create a task from an email – and now I want to share a few tips that will make your task lists easier to manage. In its standard configuration, tasks in Outlook are little more than a list; a list that seems to get longer and longer…
Before we begin to look at the various choices we have in relation to reconfiguring tasks we need to make a quick distinction. The tasks area in the outlook folder list is known as Tasks. The area on the right-hand side of the calendar is the task pad. The reason for making this distinction is necessary because the tasks folder is where we will be managing our global view of tasks, whereas the task pad is where we will be managing them on a more day-to-day basis.
By default, the tasks folder shows us the following field icons; ‘complete’, ’subject’ and ‘due date’. While this provides us with some important information relating to our tasks, with a little work we can make the tasks folder much more effective. In order to do this we will need to add a number of additional fields to the default ones as well as make a couple of changes in how Outlook deals with our task information.
One of the things that annoy most Outlook users who try to utilise tasks is how Outlook deals with completed tasks. When you complete a task and tick it off on your task list, Outlook simply puts a line through the task and leaves it in the list. This means that it’s very easy for your task list to become difficult to manage.
Changes you can make to our task folder so its more effective: If we take our mouse and right-click on the word ’subject’ we should be presented with a pop-up. On this pop-up, scroll down to ‘customise current view’ and click on that. We should then be presented with another much larger pop-up which we can use to reconfigure our tasks folder.
Firstly, let’s click on the fields button…
…from here we can add some additional fields to the standard ones. A couple of fields that I think are very useful to included here are ’start date’ and ‘categories’.
Regardless of what you which additional fields you choose, my bottom four fields would always be ’subject’ ’start date’, ‘due date’ and ‘categories’. After you have decided what fields you would like to be able to see, click the ‘ok’ button once.
Now we are going to change the way in which the task pad operates. Firstly click on the ‘group by’ button…
In the screen that appears, un-check ‘automatically group by arrangement’ if it is checked. Then, in the first ‘group items by’ field, scroll down until you find ‘complete’ then click okay.
Now click on the ‘sort’ button, and in the first field ‘sort items by’…
Scroll down until you find ‘start date.’ Now if you click okay twice you will be back to the main tasks screen and you should be able to see some real differences in the way the calendar operates.
