Learning to manage your email and time effectively is not only a function of Outlook features. Control of your schedule comes from understanding and following best practices in how you work. Renée explains the principles behind the practice of the "four Ds" in handling email:

1. Delete it.
2. Do it.
3. Delegate it.
4. Defer it.

But which one to employ? Renée offers some advice to Harry and something rings a bell for him...

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A lot of email messages you get don’t need a response, and don't even need to be read right away, especially those from large distribution lists. Renée shows Harry how to set up rules in Outlook that route email from those lists to special folders, to be read at a time that Harry schedules in his regular routine.

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In Harry's next visit with Renée, she explains that by creating Search Folders—which look just like regular folders—Harry doesn't have to know where to hunt for a particular message. She explains to him that there's no more need for panicking when he wants to find a particular message by keyword or whatever. So now, Harry is starting to get the idea that if he creates the Search Folders, Outlook will do the heavy lifting.

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Sorting through email—sometimes in that panicked or semi-panicked state—may seem the most logical way to figure out what you need to do RIGHT NOW. But I can tell you by experience that it isn't. If you have something that need to get done pronto and that you didn't schedule for a specific time in your calendar (and therefore isn't just waiting around to alert you with a pop-up reminder) one way to make sure you're aware of it is to turn an email into a task.

Renée explains to Harry how to do this, and also how he can work with tasks in other ways to make sure some prioritizing—and not freaking out—is going on.

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Adding categories is like tagging photos or adding tags to blog posts: you're adding little handles or hooks that help you gather related messages. Watch how Harry's eyes are opened even further in this next video when Renée explains to him how categories can really lighten his load when used as they were meant to be used.

(You can benefit from using just some of the best practices that are shown in this series. For example, even if you don't want to go through all your stored email to add details like categories, you can benefit by starting with the messages you're working with right now.)

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When you're searching for a particular email message, you don't have to know what folder it's in (unlike your filing system at home); search will find it for you. Organizing and staying on top of your mail can involve creating a folder structure that makes sense to you, and there are some tried and true ways that work for most people.

In today's video, Harry finds himself on his way to organization nirvana.

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If you've been using Outlook as an email program for a while and are ready to start using it as a full productivity suite, this training is for you. Perhaps you've already found the article Best Practices for Outlook 2010 on Office.com and would like to see an overview of how it works in practice. This series shows step-by-step how to get started by giving an example of how it worked for Harry, an employee at Contoso.

As Harry’s star rises and he’s asked to take on more ownership of more projects, now’s the time to make sure he has a good program in place when it comes to email, his calendar, and his contacts and tasks. All of those things in Outlook are designed work together but if he doesn't set up some sort of system, Harry may find himself falling behind, misplacing important mails and dates, and not living up to what his boss thinks is his potential.

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You're a rogue, a character, a one-of-a-kind. You care for neither paper nor plastic (as if). So maybe, when you open up Outlook for the day, you don't WANT mail to show up first. Why paint yourself into a corner, answering all those mails right away when you don't have to? Maybe you need to ease into your work day. Lucky for you, you can start Outlook showing your Calendar, Contacts, or Tasks (or even Notes or Journal) or anything else in Outlook you feel like seeing first thing. If there's one...

I probably spend most of my working day in Outlook—work email, Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, Notes, and even personal email (hey if Outlook makes it so easy then I have no choice but to use it). Every new version of Outlook comes with its own set of new and improved features, but Outlook 2010 really raised the bar (and frankly, I'm not easily impressed).

And even though you and I both have been using Office 2010 for more than a while now and have started to take some of these fun and useful features for granted, it's time to trot them out again for you, in case you're not aware of them or completely forgot about them.

Read about are my three favorite new/improved features in Outlook 2010: Conversation View, the Ignore button, and Quick Steps.

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You're a very organized person and expect the devices that you use with Exchange ActiveSync (your iPhone, Android, etc.) to follow along. And most of the time they do, But we've (and no doubt, you have, too) observed a few issues regarding automatic meeting processing as well as connectivity and synchronization failures, and so we've addressed these in a knowledge base article that you may want to take a look at.

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