Following up with outlook
is a vital problem, if you sent a email and didn’t get a reply, sometimes you want to send a ‘follow-up‘ to remind about your previous email. There is no similar tracking feature for this in Outlook, bu there are a few utilities that help managing reminders.
You can find a good and thorough comparison of 3 most popular follow-up tools for outlook - MAPILab’s E-mail Follow Up, Sperry Software’s Follow Up Reminder and NetCentric’s Getting Things Done Outlook Add-in here.
GTD Outlook addin is the most powerful but the most expensive. However, I will still be looking for other solutions for email management and increasing productivity for you work with email and Outlook.
I’ve just bought “Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized” By Sally McGhee.
Whilst a lot of the principles will be very familiar to those who use GTD (McGhee worked with David Allen), there are quite a few useful hints and tips in it.
Personally I use simple descriptive folders and flags to manage my emails. Each friday, for the first time in years, I’m down to a zero inbox - yeay!
Katy,
Thank you for your feedback.
That is not really so simple. I do also use flags, reminders and folders system (which I’m going to write about), but outlook:
1) Doesn’t provide reminding out-of-inbox
2) It sucks as CRM system.. Like when you have one inbox and one space of folders, it is ok, but when you have many projects, many companies and many folders, you need an automated system for tracking emails.
I’d like to invite you to check out the ClearContext Information Management System. v2 is currently in beta release and provides a follow-up button, along with prioritization of the Inbox, automated categorization and filing, and workflow buttons for quickly actioning email. For more information, see our beta page:
http://www.clearcontext.com/beta
If you have the opportunity to check us out, I would love to hear your feedback.
Thanks for your time,
Brad Meador
ClearContext