One of the more difficult habits to break when using Outlook is hard to change because of how the program is designed.
Here is the typical scenario:
- Several pieces of email come into the Outlook in-box
- Each of them share a single characteristic, in that they require about ten minutes of work
- They have nothing else in common
Here is what I would really want to do, that as far as I can tell is not programmed into the latest version of Outlook.
I really want to assign them to the next scheduled time that I have set aside to reply to disparate emails. I wish I could assign them to a single time-slot in Outlook, and then when the time comes, that I could click on the time-slot and all the emails I need to reply to could come up. This could easily be achieved by allowing some kind of instant tagging in Outlook that allows an email to be connected to a particular kind of time-slot.
Instead, here are my options as I see them, constrained as they are:
- I can move the emails into a folder called “For Return Emails Time-slot” and hope that when the next Return Email time-slot comes up I can remember to pull up the folder
- I can schedule each individual email as a time-slot of its own, and that makes sense for really complex emails that take, say 45 minutes to reply to. However, 15 emails are difficult to coordinate as separate time-slots
- I can leave them in the in-box – which in 2Time is a big no-no. This quickly leads to overwhelming chaos.
None of these actions is perfect, but the best one seems to be the first.