Microsoft Outlook is the go-to organization tool for a busy entrepreneur, as it allows you to keep your emails, calendar, and contacts all neatly together and accessible. By putting the three together in one program, you’re able to spend more time working with your clientele and customers and less time scrolling through months old emails trying to find the time for next week’s meeting.
Outlook allows you to view all of your emails at once, regardless of how many email addresses you’re using. You are also able to use folders to organize your personal email account from your professional email account, which means that you don’t have to sacrifice one for the other. You truly can have it all.
The email function also enables you to categorize your emails and mark them for follow-up later. Using Outlook, you won’t have to worry about forgetting to reply to an email that you mark for later, because the program will remind you. The email function also works with the other components of Outlook to allow for seamless organization, for example, you can click on a date in an email to easily add it to your Outlook calendar.
Calendar
Outlook calendar puts all of your appointments together in one place to ensure that you never miss an important meeting or appointment again. You can set events to recur on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis, and you can also categorize events by color and importance. Similar to the email function, you can create several calendars, so you’re able to separate different aspects of your life and business, which you can then view together or separately.
The Outlook calendar also adds to your organization by allowing you to attach documents or contact information directly to events, so that you can easily find addresses or meeting notes. This saves time when trying to prepare yourself for an appointment, and helps you to see your schedule in a way that makes sense to you.
Contacts
The Contacts feature on Outlook also helps you to keep track of all of the important people in your life. You can put all of their information in one place and even include and make business cards for people. Outlook also allows you to organize your contacts into groups to make it easier to send messages and set appointments with people.
Outlook can also connect to social media to put contacts in your computer to make finding people quick and easy. In the opposite direction, you can also share contacts and groups with other people, making it easy to collaborate with others in a group.
Great for the Entrepreneur
Outlook’s vast array of features is great for the busy entrepreneur. Many entrepreneurs who are just starting out may be working a job other than their entrepreneurial venture, in addition to having a personal life, and Outlook allows you to mix and separate these different parts of your life as you see fit for organizational purposes.
Outlook is a great program, not only for entrepreneurs, but for almost everyone. I used to think that outlook could only be used for email but that is far from true as it contains plenty of other useful tools to kelp keep you well organized.
I was surprised by how many different tools Outlook has. The fact that you can have all of your email addresses together, both personal and professional is a great tool to have, as I have two different email addresses.