Tips & Tricks Tuesday: Creating tasks quickly with Outlook signatures
Tuesday, August 24, 2010 by Andrew Conkling
If you deal with a lot of email (and a lot of us do!) and would like to turn your messages into tasks, blevinweb's handy tip will be very welcome:
I used to work off my Outlook email inbox AND my RTM list. Then I figured out a very simple yet powerful way to make them play nice.
I created an Outlook Signature like this, called RTM:
Location: Work
List: (w) Daily
Tags: next—
When someone sends me an email that I would like an RTM task for, I do this:
- Click Forward.
- Select (or type) the RTM contact in the To: field.
- My default signature appears at the top of the forwarded message. I click on the Signature button in the Message window and change it to RTM. The RTM signature appears. By having the 3 dashes at the end of my RTM signature the message body will be inserted as a task note!
- Click Send.
The task shows up in my (w) Daily list, tagged as "next" for my Smart List with the task name set to the subject of the email (which I sometimes edit if it is too vague before sending), and the body of the email is neatly placed in the Notes tab.
Using this technique allows me to get to a "Zero Inbox" zen-like state and places all my tasks in one central location. Enjoy!
blevinweb also mentions using a separate signature for different lists or high priority items; read more about Remember The Milk for Email to see all the options.
Also check out this previous tip for a similar method in Gmail.
Thanks for sharing this tip, blevinweb! You're our Tips & Tricks Tuesday winner this week.
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Posted in: Tips & Tricks
