Do you often feel as if your Outlook is taking more time out of your workday than it should? You can make Outlook work for you instead of against you by making a few small changes.

Do you also make these 5 time wasting mistakes in Outlook?

Mistake 1: You receive an e-mail and want to send your friend just one paragraph of the mail.  You highlight the text, copy it, create a new message and paste it into the new message.  Or you forward the email and then delete everything you do not want to send.

Mistake 2:  To create a new appointment you double-click the beginning time in your Calendar, type in the details and select the start and end times from the drop-down list and then click “Save and Close”.

Mistake 3: When you switch on Outlook, the first screen you see is your Inbox. You get seduced into doing your email for the next 30 minutes and forget an important meeting.

Mistake 4: You are working in your Calendar and want to create and send a new email. You click on “Mail” en then “New Email”.

Mistake 5: You read a new e-mail and then leave it in the Inbox “for now” and change it to “Mark as unread” to remind you that something still needs to be done about it.

If you also make these 5 mistakes, it is an indication that you could be wasting as much as 3 weeks every year because you are using Outlook inefficiently.

Most people use Outlook only for email and meeting management – and they never get to use it as a productivity tool that can save them up to 40 minutes every single day.  They dabble with Contacts and Tasks, but skip Notes, Journal, and Discussion Notes.

To learn how to make the most of your day with the help of Outlook, enrol for our new 5 hour Outlook Productivity workshop.   You will also get a time proven system for managing your everyday workflow more efficiently.

For more information on this workshop, contact email itkursus@sun.ac.za, read more on the wiki or contact the IT Service Desk at 808 4367.