Office 2007 Professional Living in Outlook Effect

The Living in Outlook series is about sharing tips and workflows around real-world scenarios. We;ll start the conversation with a topic – you can add to it by posting your tips and workflows in the comments!

After having sent apparently one too many “nag mails” about a seemingly forgotten work item, a colleague of mine asked me what my secret was for tracking open issues.  I will now attempt to answer his question while publicly professing my love for the Outlook feature that made it all possible: “tracked conversations”. 

One of the things that I love about working on Outlook is that I;m helping to build a tool that is an integral part of my own workflow. Specifically, there are relatively few issues that I deal with that aren;t at some point and in some way discussed over e-mail.  This means that closely integrating my issue tracking with my e-mail workflow is critical. For this I use e-mail flagging, which allows me to pick a target completion date for a given issue, and the Task List in my To-Do Bar, which tells me how well I;m keeping up with those completion dates.  The feature that brings it all together for me, though, is “tracked conversations”.

Three Steps to “Never Dropping the Ball” using Tracked Conversations

Step 1:

Flag E-mail for Follow-Up with an Appropriate Due Date

You can flag e-mail that you;re about to send, flag e-mail that you;ve received, you can even “cheat” by either sending yourself a piece of mail or creating a special-purpose task for those issues that didn;t originate over e-mail. If an e-mail relates to a particularly important issue, consider adding a custom flag with descriptive text and/or a reminder.


Step 2:

Update Flags Upon Receiving New Messages in “Tracked Conversations”

When I receive a new message that is in the same conversation as a message that I previously flagged I see an InfoBar message that tells me that the new message is an update to a “tracked conversation”:








By clicking on the InfoBar I am presented with these two options:



The “Find related messages” option will bring up a new window that displays all of the other messages that were part of the same conversation. However, in most cases, all I really care about is the message that I originally flagged, which I can open immediately by choosing “Open Original Flagged Message”.

For me, updating the flag might mean:

- Clearing the flag: The issue is now resolved!

- Updating the due time: The new message provided a more accurate ETA.

- “Moving” the flag to the current message: The new message provided more context and I;d like to refer back to the new message instead of the original when I deal with this issue in the future.

Step 3:

Once a Day Take Some Action on Each Overdue Flag in My To-Do Bar

For me, this usually means one of the following:

- Sending out a reminder mail or asking for status

- Updating the due time to a later date

- Taking care of the task myself!

My Most Common Flagging Workflows

Here are some of my more common workflows that involve message flagging and tracked conversations.  Hopefully you;ll find something below that maps well to the types of issues you have a tendency to forget (and feel free to add more in your comments).

· Delegating Issues - Melissa MacBeth gave a nice high-level overview of one of the primary “on-ramps” for tracked conversations in this post about a feature we call “Send-and-Track” on her Tasks and Time Management in Outlook blog.  The idea is simple: when I ask someone to do something important over e-mail, I flag the draft message for myself so that I remember to follow up after the message has been sent and ensure that the action I requested was completed.  The recipient of the message never knows that I have it flagged (at least they didn;t until they read this blog post…).

· Making a Commitment – Since I believe in the Golden Rule, I use “Send-and-Track” not just when I ask others to do something but also when I commit to getting something done.  In other words, if I send you a message that says “I;ll get to this next week”, chances are that I flagged that message for “Next Week” before hitting send (whether I actually get to it before the end of next week is a different issue…). 

· Ensuring Follow-up – I monitor a lot of e-mail aliases that receive support questions about Outlook.  When it comes to support mail, I don;t really care who answers the question (so delegation doesn;t make sense), nor do I necessarily want to be the one who answers every question (so making a commitment doesn;t make sense), but I do want to make sure that someone does something about any important issue that I see.  Therefore, I flag all “interesting” support questions with a due date of “Today” and only clear those flags if/when someone takes ownership of the issue and/or resolves it.  At the end of the day, if no ownership/resolution has occurred, I will decide how to best proceed with each issue.

Well, that;s the basic idea.  Now,Office 2007 Professional, if you;ll excuse me, I have to go and clear the flagged piece of e-mail that I sent to my colleague in which I committed to explaining how I track issues…

Alon Brown
Outlook Development Engineer
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