Attack of the Inbox

Sometimes I feel like I’m constantly cleaning, tidying and organizing. Cleaning laundry, tidying the playroom, washing dishes, organizing my desk…it’s never-ending. The last thing I want to do is feel like my inbox has become that secret closet full of junk where no one can find anything.

Cleaning up that junk closet can seem overwhelming, but it has to be done. If you let your e-mail and calendars get out of control, it won’t be long before you start to feel flooded by the mess.

Microsoft Outlook 2010 helps even the busiest family cut through the clutter. Outlook lets you schedule tasks, set up meetings, save contacts, and even create to-do lists. You can also organize your e-mails into categories and folders, making finding your messages easy.
But you probably already knew all that.

Outlook 2010 has some additional features that make things even easier. Check out how this freelance artist and mother depends on Outlook to keep her family’s busy schedule in order:

Want to learn more? Here are just a few of Outlook 2010’s new features designed to help you better manage your e-mail – and your hectic life.

1. Cleanup: Cleanup helps you get to the point of the conversation by removing redundant e-mails. Even better, you can mute or ignore messages – minimizing unnecessary distraction.

2. Conversation view: This new feature allows you to manage e-mail correspondence through groupings, so you can easily condense and categorize the e-mails you receive. You can turn it on and off with a single click, and even ignore a conversation that has become irrelevant to you.

This is what it looks like:

This is where to go to turn it on or off (right-click on the Arrange By: bar):

This is how to ignore a conversation (right-click on a message in the conversation to get this menu):

3. Quick steps: If you’re anything like me, you have a ritual when it comes to handling e-mails. Quick steps allow you to simplify your tasks, by creating your own steps in the Home ribbon. This will make your processes quicker and easier to perform.

4. Social connector: Most of us spend the majority of our working day with e-mail. But we also love the connection to family, friends and colleagues that social networking sites provide. What if you could merge your inbox with your social networks? Outlook Social Connector provides at-a-glance information about people who are e-mailing you. You can see the most recent status updates, wall posts, photos, attachments and appointments for the people you care about the most. Whether you like Facebook, Windows Live, LinkedIn or MySpace, the Outlook Social Connector gives you an aggregated view into your social networking life. Connections to these social networks need to be downloaded and installed before they appear in your Outlook.

After the connectors are installed and you’ve configured them with your Facebook, LinkedIn, etc, account information, you’ll see information from those social networks show up when you preview an email from your contacts.

Still not convinced? Take a minute to hear from Heather, who is a mother in a family of seven. Four of her children are on the autism spectrum, leading to a busy life with sometimes up to 40 appointments in one week.

Ruth Morton
Microsoft Geek and Mother of Twins