How to manage emails with tasks in Outlook

Do you find it hard to track and then follow up on emails?
 
Microsoft Outlook has this very handy function that turns an email in your inbox into a task. No more having to mark an email as unread because you need to do something with it later. If you use Outlook as your email program, I encourage you to start using the follow-up-flag function to manage your emails better and be more organised.

1. First of all open the relevant email that has a related task. For example, maybe the sender is asking you for some more information about something and you need to respond with some flyers or other documents.

2. Next, click on the down arrow beside the red flag. You’ll be able to select when you want or need to complete the task by. A note will appear under the header section of the email you have open, showing when you’ve flagged the due date for.

3.  What is clever about this, is that the email will show up as a task in the tasks section of Outlook. In the left hand pane in Outlook, at the bottom you will see the envelope icon, a calendar icon, a people icon, a clipboard icon and a piece of paper icon. Click on the clipboard as that will take you to your list of tasks. You will find your email there in the list. You can manage this task from this area. What is useful is that you can see the list of emails that require an action and all the dates the tasks are due by. You can double click on the email to open it and respond to the sender, and it is the place where you can tick the box to show that the task has been completed. You can also add new tasks here if you need to.

4. If you want to remove the flag from the email, simply click on the down arrow next to the red flag in the menu (ribbon) and select ‘clear flag’.

​Are you going to give it go? Please let me know your thoughts in the comments.