Outlook Wrangling 1 - Read Means Read

We all have to use Outlook, whether we like it or not most of us are chained to Outlook like I’m glued to the TV on Thursdays for Gray’s Anatomy (I’m married now you remember).

Everyone has their own system for using Outlook, and I certainly wouldn’t start selling any books about mine, but I thought it would be interesting for other to hear, and by all means chime in with your tips and tricks in the comments.

First a little credit where credit is due. The basics of this were suggested to me by a former boss, Paul Parisi and fit well in the Getting Things Done (GTD) framework, although I hadn’t heard of GTD when I came up with this.

The single biggest thing you can do to make Outlook bend to your will is to change the way Outlook marks messages as “read.” By default Outlook is setup to mark messages as read after five seconds of viewing in the Preview Pane.

I don’t know about you, but I can hardly do anything in five seconds. My car can do about 0 to 35 in five seconds, but my neighbors frown on that. Also because of the speed bumps in my neighborhood my suspension frowns on it.

So turn that off, the option is in Tools > Options then switch to the “Other” tab (oh the glories of Outlook preferences) then click the “Reading Pane” button. Make sure that only the “Single key reading” option is checked. Now you say when an item is read not Outlook.

Now you have an easy way to determine what you have dealt with mentally and what you have not. I don’t mark something as read until I have read it, understood it and decided on a next action. That next action could be a reply to the email, could be a conversation or could happen down the road a bit.

If it happens down the road I flag the message, for more on that tune in tomorrow.