Color me GREEN!
This is the month when we are all Irish, at least in spirit (and hopefully in luck!)
Let’s take a tip from the color wheel and see how color can help us stay organized.
Did you know that you could assign a color to your frequent email senders in order to identify messages that you may want to respond to more quickly? I used this quite effectively when I had a ‘challenging boss’. In order to try to stay ahead of him, I color-coded all of his messages in red so that I could easily find any that he may have sent and respond to them quickly.
Here is how you can see, at a glance, email from people that you want to pay attention to and at least prioritize these over all of the drivel that passes through your inbox.
• In Outlook, go to “Tools”
• Click “Organize”
• The “Ways to Organize” pane should appear
• Click “Using Color”
• Here you can either select a message in your inbox and the sender will be highlighted in the display. Select a color and click “Apply Color”. You can also enter the senders address and apply a selected color in that manner.
• There is also a field where you may choose to turn colors on for emails that are sent only to you, for example. You can undo this if you find it to be too distracting.
• To view or edit your color selections or for more advanced features, click on “Automatic Formatting” in the upper right hand corner of the “Ways to Organize” Navigation pane.
For those of you who use other email systems, this feature is typically available as well.
You will likely not be able to color code every message you receive, nor would you want to, but this tip can help you find the ‘pot of gold’ for those messages that need to be addressed as priority one.
