During my time managing projects, I’ve often been asked about how I ‘remember’ to follow up on various items…especially ones from a few weeks or even months ago. This post outlines the method that works best for me which utilizes color categories and rules in Microsoft Outlook.
It’s a very simple and straightforward system that works extremely well for me. I hope that you will also find it useful. Please feel free to contact me, or post a comment, with any questions.
Step 1: Create a new folder in your mailbox.
I label mine as “*Follow Up”, with the * causing it to appear at the top of my mailbox. Name it according to your preference.
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If piecing together the information from all 3 parts of the “Using Outlook templates (with toolbar integration) for common project-related messages” blog series isn’t your favorite thing to do, I completely understand. Hence, the reason all of the posts have been compiled into a single PDF file and made available for download via the following link:
Outlook templates and toolbar for common project emails
Please feel free to leave a comment if you have questions about this information.
Sharing the custom toolbar
So, you’ve created some Outlook templates and a custom toolbar for yourself and your process for sending these messages has been streamlined as a result. You realize that each member of the project team sends you a weekly status report, which you then take and craft your weekly project status summary.
So, how can you create a template for the weekly status report and then a toolbar so they can also benefit? The template creation process is the same as outlined above. Unless you want to share your entire toolbar with the team, you should create a new toolbar as detailed previously for only the weekly status report.
Once the template and toolbar have been created, you will need to perform a search on your local disk drive for the OUTCMD.DAT file. This file is typically located in the following location based on the version of Windows operating system that is installed on your computer:
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