Some folks have noticed since moving to work from home in the last year, an overwhelming number of appointments are being scheduled on your calendar. Topics that could have been discussed while popping into a co-worker’s office are now eating away at the real estate on your calendar. Even as Covid begins to recede, at least part-time WFH is likely not going anywhere so we will need strategies to cope with this “new normal”.

Here are a couple of tricks to assist in lightening the calendar overload.

Categories – tagging your appointments as types can help when viewing the calendar by day or week. Creating categories will assist in keeping appointments organized and easier to understand when viewing your calendar. Simply right-click on an appointment to open the Categorize menu and then All Categories, click the New category button and add a name and select a color as you like, and click OK to complete. You then can add the categories to existing events by clicking on to Categorize menu and selecting a category or include when creating new appointments from the ribbon.

Quick View – allows you to peak at your calendar from any Outlook window without switching screen focus. At the bottom left corner of the Outlook window, hoover over the Calendar icon to see the month view and upcoming appointments.

Convert Email into Appointment – some email replies need an appointment to discuss instead of a written reply. You have the ability to Reply with a Meeting option (Ctrl + Alt +R) which will convert the email into an appointment for you to complete.

Scheduling Assistance – when you are creating appointments, after adding your attendants, choose the Scheduling Assistant tab to see the availability grid for attendees in your environment, this option would not be available to external attendees.

Bonus Tip:
Count of Folders – Folder Count – When you have sub-folders under your Inbox, by default it displays any unread messages, but what if you wanted to see the number of items in the folder. Simply right-click the folder and select properties, change the option to Show the total number of items.

Mary Ann Muhlbaier
Morae Director