Organize your Inbox by converting Outlook 2007 e-mail into tasks

When you receive e-mails you need to act on — but not right away — consider turning them into tasks, complete with follow-up reminders.

While you’re working on a report due tomorrow, you stop to check your e-mail. Some of your messages need attention, but you don’t have time to work on them now. You could flag each e-mail for follow-up, but you might end up with an Inbox cluttered with flagged e-mails. You could move all messages to a To-do folder, but by the time you get around to going through them, you will have forgotten why you put them there.

Outlook 2007’s e-mail to task conversion feature provides a third alternative that not only relieves Inbox clutter but also reminds you to follow up on those e-mails. To demonstrate, let’s say you received an e-mail about a new publishing program that you want to check out next week. Follow these steps to convert that e-mail into a task on your calendar:

• Drag the message from the Inbox list to the Task button on the right
• In the Task pane, enter a day next week as a start date and end date.
• Delete any part of the message that does not pertain to the task.
• Click Save and Close.

Your e-mail is now listed as a task for you to complete at a later date. You can delete the e-mail from the Inbox, if you want.

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