Randy Dean shows how to convert emails into Outlook tasks, calendar events, and contacts using drag-and-drop or Quick Steps. Turn a quick email into a task with a due date, an appointment with a location, or a contact with a signature, then delete it from your inbox.
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Hi, this is Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert, and I'd like to share with you tonight another one of my favorite video tips. This is my tip on how you can actually utilize Microsoft Outlook to convert your emails into task and calendar items and even contacts in Microsoft Outlook. So let's move forward. Now, if you've ever been to one of my programs before, you know I have this thing called a Taming Email Decision Tree. I basically learned the premise of this idea from David Allen, the author of Getting Things Done, about 25 years ago. Randy Dean, back when everything was still pretty much paper-based, and I applied it to the whole process of managing your email. And in essence, what it says is if a new email comes in and you're checking your email actively, if you run into an email that's something you can handle in a couple of minutes or less, just get those done the first time you look at them. Who wants to look at them a second time? Every time you touch an email that can be handled quickly a second or third time, you're adding time to getting it done, which doesn't make a lot of sense. The longer emails, what I basically am recommending that you do is convert to task and calendar items, and we're about to show you how Outlook allows you to do that automatically. And then once that email is either completed or on your task list or calendar, you don't need it in your inbox anymore. You either file it or you delete it, and if you don't have a good place to file it, make a folder and put it there. In essence, that way, by following the simple decision tree, you can get these things out. But what I'd like to do right now is show you how Microsoft Outlook can help automate this process. Let's go back into my Microsoft Outlook here, and you'll notice that inside my inbox I have a simple single email which shows it how to convert your Outlook emails into task, calendar, and contact items. And there's two ways you can do this. The first way is what I've been using for literally about 12 years now. All you need to do is just click on the email, hold the click— that's a left click that I'm doing— and hold the click and drag it down to the task icon in Outlook. When you drag it down to Tasks and drop it, what it does is it automatically pops up a new task window. And of course, now I can convert this. Show how to convert emails to tasks. Add a due date, we'll say today. Priority high. Category marketing PR. Category website. And you'll see I did all of that in just a few seconds flat. And notice this, the email is actually inside the task. So I've got the email text inside the task, meaning I don't need that in my inbox anymore. Let me hit save and close, and now that's part of my Outlook task list. But now watch, I can do the same treatment by doing a left-click, hold the click, and this time I'm going to add it to my calendar. Drag it down here to calendar, drop it. By dragging it and dropping it to Calendar, it will do the same treatment and open up a new calendar item in Microsoft Outlook, which I can then say, "Show how to convert email to calendar." Location: Home— if I can type— Office East Lansing, Michigan. And we'll make the date tomorrow at 2:00 AM/PM. How long did that take? Once again, we're able to create something out of it. And even watch this, I'm not going to save the changes on that because it's already in my task list. Watch what I can even do with this one. I'd like to see if this Randy Dean guy's in my contact database. Left-click, hold the click, drag it down to People and drop it. That auto-creates a brand new contact item. And so what you'll see is when it pops up the window, it'll auto-populate both Name and email address, but in this day, notice that the email is over here now in the notes field and you can come down to the email signature that most people have and look at this, I can grab that job title, pick that up and move that over here to job title. I can grab this phone number right here just by highlighting, releasing the click and then dragging it over and also the same with mobile which I can pick up and move over here. So in a few seconds flat, I can take an item and add it to my calendar list. And if you take a look at this, notice what I've done. I've been able to take this single email, which has not left my inbox, by the way, it's still in there, this single email, turn it into a task item, turn it into a calendar item, turn it into a new contact in my Microsoft Outlook. That's called drag and drop. But if you notice directly above this, new in Outlook 2010 and also in Outlook 13, they have this thing called Quick Steps. And watch what happens with Quick Steps. I just click on the email, come up here to this one that's already in there called Convert to Task and click on it. And look what that does. It's the same basic capability as the drag and drop to Tasks. So you can either click on the email, drag it down, and drop it on Tasks to create a new task item, or you can use the Quick Steps. And how do you create a Quick Step? It's pretty easy. Watch this. I can come up here to the top and see how it says Create New. I'm going to make one called Convert to Calendar, and then the action that I want to do— and if I come in, I'll have to look, there's a whole series of actions on things that you can do in here. I can come all the way down here to Appointment and create an appointment with text of message and then hit Finish. And by doing that, notice that I've got this up here, Convert to Calendar, so it's part of my top menu now. And this is a nice way to allow you to do the same kind of treatments using either drag and drop or quick steps. One nice thing about quick steps, you can even go a step further. Take a look at this. I will come in here into this and I will once again create new. I'm going to create a bogus one called e-newsletter. And let me show you what I can do with this one. First thing, whenever an e-newsletter comes into my inbox, I just don't want them to be looking like they're unread messages. That clutters things up. So I'm going to come down here and just mark this as read. But then here's the other thing I want to do. I want to add a second action. Look at the other action I can add to this, which is sort of fun. I could automatically move it to my e-newsletter folder, which I could specify right here, hit finish, and then I'd have one that whenever an e-newsletter comes in, I can just click on that email, click on this e-newsletter quick step, and what it what it will do is automatically both mark it as read and put it away. That way I don't have them in here. I really like Quick Steps for multi-step things that you are doing very frequently, and it's a great way for you to allow yourself to use these tools to get an inbox that looks like the one you're seeing on your screen right now. So let's go ahead and finish this thing up. So we covered how you can utilize the Taming Email Decision Tree to make this thing work and utilize those automated tools, both drag-and-drop and quick steps in your Microsoft Outlook, including both Outlook 2010 and Outlook 2013, to allow you to actually work and use this decision tree regularly. So with this, I'm going to come up here and let's thank you for your time and being part of today's program. Uh, my name again is Randy Dean. I am known as the Email Sanity Expert, and if you'd like to find out more about my programs, including more tutorials like this, as well as full-length online streaming programs on Microsoft Outlook usage, Google and Gmail usage, and smartphone and tablet usage, just visit my website randaldean.com and then click on the e-learning tab to learn more. Thank you for your time.
