The only way you can hope to have Outlook truly help you in your goal of achieving peak personal productivity is by making full use of the program's capabilities. This means being able to put Outlook to its best use in communicating with your co-workers and clients, organizing your ideas and supporting materials, prioritizing your tasks, planning your schedule, and evaluating your prowess in the area of time management.

One way to initiate this process is by expanding your Outlook horizons beyond e-mail in the Mail module. You can do this by getting an overview of the capabilities of Outlook's various modules and by learning the shortcut keys as outlined in Chapter 5 and then, perhaps, by making Outlook Today or the Calendar module the new center of your Outlook productivity system, as outlined in Chapter 6.

Like the paper inbox you may keep on your desk, the Inbox folder in the Outlook Mail module is meant to be a temporary holding bin for the stuff that comes in (e-mail messages, in this case).

Too often, however, Outlook users treat the Inbox like it was a semi-permanent storage container and then soon end up always dreading having to open it to read new messages. You simply must take the suggestions outlined in Chapter 7 to heart and clean out that overflowing Inbox if you're to have any hope of removing your Inbox-phobia. And the best way I know to do this is by organizing your e-mail, archiving what you can and then putting the rest of the messages into the appropriate subfolders for later processing and easy retrieval.

Doing radical housecleaning in your Inbox periodically to empty it out is just not an effective way to deal with your ongoing e-mail problem. You'll be much happier and more productive by keeping your Inbox in a manageable state near empty.

As Chapter 8 suggests, this means being able to deal with incoming batches of e-mail messages through a combination of automatic processing via e-mail rules and manual processing by means of categorizing the messages and then moving them into their appropriate processing and holding Inbox subfolders.

Most of the time when contemplating your e-mail productivity, you think exclusively of dealing with the e-mail messages you receive, with no real thought regarding the effective composition and strategic sending of new messages.

In Chapter 9, however, I maintain that improving the e-mail messages you send out can also result in improving your personal productivity. This happens because by making communication with co-workers and clients notably more effective, you often dramatically decrease the amount of time and energy lost in your recipients seeking further clarification and your involvement in continued e-mail message reply-and-send.

One surefire technique for transforming Outlook into much more than a mere e-mail program is to either make Outlook Today (Personal Folders) in the Mail module or the Calendar module the center of the program as a personal information manager.

To implement this change, simply follow the general instructions I give in Chapter 5 for selecting a new Outlook startup folder and use them to make either the Personal Folders (for Outlook Today) or the Calendar folder the new program default. That way, each time you launch Outlook, you're immediately confronted with either the overview of your calendar and tasks presented in Outlook Today view or with the daily, weekly, or monthly appointments on your Calendar.

Successfully charting and maintaining your upcoming appointments, events, and meetings on your calendar is only one part of the story. To really give a boost to your productivity with the people with whom you need to collaborate, start sharing your calendar (as described in Chapter 10) with all those who need to know your whereabouts and would benefit from having access to your immediate schedule.

In sharing this vital scheduling information with those who need it, you'll not only find it a great deal easier to hit upon those times when you can meet and work together, but you'll also find that it helps build and solidify a sense of teamwork and cooperation.

As soon as you understand how to effectively maintain your to-do list in Outlook (as I describe in Chapter 12) and actually get into the habit of doing it, I'm pretty sure the use of the other Outlook modules in your pursuit of peak productivity will fall right into place.

I say this because I find the ability to maintain a thorough to-do list central to other aspects of personal productivity, including organizing your ideas and successfully managing and scheduling your time. For this reason, you may want to make mastering task management your first priority (right after organizing and cleaning out your e-mail Inbox, of course).

Productivity is akin to creativity, and in order to maintain any semblance of creativity, you can't be laden down with niggling details. And, as I point out in Chapter 13, one of the most effective ways to clear out space in your head is by getting all those small details and stray ideas stored on your computer in the form of Outlook notes.

With Outlook notes, note taking can be very painless and quite ad hoc (assuming, of course, that you have the Outlook program running whenever your computer is turned on and Windows is booted). When jotting down ideas as Outlook notes, concentrate only on capturing the idea with little or no regard for its classification or organization. Later on, you can easily arrange your notes and, if necessary, turn them into to-do items on your task list or appointments on your calendar.

As I describe in Chapter 14, the Outlook Journal enables you to automatically track your interactions with certain contacts in your address book as well as log your edits with other Office programs such as Word and Excel.

As such, in some work situations, this type of automatic journaling can provide you with a fairly accurate timeline on your major work interactions. You can then use the timeline to evaluate the current state of your time management and, if necessary, to find ways to improve upon it.

Applying all these nifty Outlook productivity skills and habits is of little consequence when you have to leave it all behind on your work computer when you're not in the office. Therefore, if telecommuting or work-related travel form a significant part of your job, you'll definitely want to take Outlook with you when you're on the go or not working at your office computer.

And the most convenient way to do this, as Chapter 15 points out, is by synchronizing key Outlook data items you maintain in the program on your desktop computer with your mobile device, such as a Smartphone or personal digital assistant (PDA). That way, you can access any of your Outlook contacts, calendars, to-do lists, and, in most cases, notes any time you need to while you're away from the office without having to worry the least bit that you've left someone or something vital behind.