In their book Effective Time Management – Using Microsoft Outlook to Organize Your Work and Personal Life, the authors Lothar Seiwert and Holger Woeltje provide a practical guide to using Outlook (as well as OneNote) to create a time-management system. Simply said, they teach you how to become more structured and organised when using Outlook to manage email, tasks, and appointments.
What I really like about this book is that it covers Office 2003, Office 2007, and Office 2010! While Office 2010 is already around for some time, a lot of companies and people still use Office 2007 and even Office 2003. So, even if you have one of the older versions, don’t worry, this book gives you detailed instructions on how to do things, such as setting up views in all 3 versions of Outlook.
As for the content, I have to say that I didn’t benefit much from it, as I already used most of the advise contained in this book. However, if so far you’re using only ‘standard’ Outlook, meaning you don’t let Outlook filter emails for you, you don’t create different views for your tasks to get a better overview of what is the most important thing to do, or you don’t categorise your appointments to get a better overview of your week, this may be just the right book for you. You will get to learn how to approach each of the facets of Outlook (email, tasks, appointments) and get the most out of them to become more productive, both with techniques (“choose the most important thing that you would do if you could choose only one from your tasks, assign it #1. Then, continue with the others”) and ‘implementation info’ (for example how to customise views so that you get a better overview of your tasks).
Overall, it’s a very solid book with useful advise, but nothing really new for people who already looked at time-management methods and use them.