Increase your Productivity: Work with Emails and Tasks in Outlook efficiently & Save 1 Hour per Day!
Vivian Edel · Events Manager from Munich, Bavaria
A Munich events manager turns Outlook's Tasks pane into a triage system that cuts email handling to three short sessions a day.
This course has one idea and it commits to it fully: stop reading email more than once, and let Outlook's Tasks feature carry everything that isn't a delete, an archive, or a two-minute fix. Vivian Edel, a Munich-based events manager, built the system for her own inbox and walks through it as a repeatable daily routine rather than a loose collection of tips.
The system itself
The spine of the course is a four-way filter applied to every email as it's opened, once, in chronological order rather than newest-first. Pure information gets archived or deleted. Anything answerable in under two minutes gets done immediately. Everything else becomes a task, and the course is specific about how: open a new task window and type a fresh imperative subject line rather than dragging the email into the task pane, because dragging makes the task inherit the full email subject line and buries the original message inside the completed-tasks list where it's hard to retrieve. That single distinction, easy to miss and easy to get wrong, is the most useful piece of craft in the class.
Tasks then get a priority (high, normal, or low, deliberately not a due-date system) and a start date calculated backward from when the work actually needs to happen. The rule that only three tasks per day can be high priority is a real constraint designed to stop the label from becoming meaningless, and it's the kind of specific, opinionated detail that separates this from generic productivity advice. Low-priority tasks get parked behind a recurring monthly task so they resurface for review instead of vanishing.
Setup and execution
A full lesson is spent configuring Outlook: pinning the Tasks pane, adding a one-click New Task button to the Ribbon, and rebuilding the To-Do Bar's view settings with three custom filter conditions (date completed does not exist, flag completed does not exist, due date on or before today) so it shows only what's actually relevant, not a due-date pileup. Desktop alerts and new-mail sounds get switched off entirely, which is consistent with the course's core argument: you can't limit yourself to three inbox passes a day if every message interrupts you the moment it arrives.
The demonstration lesson, working through a batch of sample emails from a request for a conference budget to an invoice to a photographer's deadline, shows the whole loop end to end and is where the earlier rules actually click into place.
Where it holds up and where it doesn't
The system is genuinely practical for anyone whose work is project-based and whose tasks vary in size and urgency. It falls apart, as the course itself acknowledges, for reactive roles where every email demands an immediate reply. The Mac version of Outlook gets an honest caveat that its Tasks feature is weaker, which will rule out a chunk of the potential audience outright. The bonus lesson on email writing, covering direct language, explicit deadlines, and clean subject lines, is solid but slight, more a coda than a fully developed second topic. At 74 minutes for a beginner audience, the course doesn't overstay its welcome, but it also doesn't go far beyond its one core mechanism, and viewers who already run any kind of structured task system elsewhere will find little new here.
The standout
The warning against dragging an email straight into the task pane, paired with the correct method of opening a new task, retitling it in the imperative, and copying only the relevant details across.
What you will learn
- A four-way decision rule for every email: delete, archive, handle in under two minutes, or convert to a task
- How to build a task properly, with an imperative subject line, attachments, and copied details, instead of dragging the email itself into the task list
- A three-tier priority system (high, normal, low) with a hard cap of three high-priority tasks per day
- How to customize the Ribbon, the To-Do Bar filters, and mail-arrival alerts so Outlook only surfaces what needs attention right now
- A monthly recurring task for revisiting low-priority items so nothing gets permanently buried
- Five habits for writing clearer emails, including trimming subject lines and front-loading deadlines
Best for: Windows-based Outlook users with varied, schedulable tasks (freelancers, project or account managers, anyone juggling multiple clients) who currently manage to-dos with notes or memory.
Skip it if: Mac Outlook users, anyone in a reactive role that requires instant action on every incoming request, or anyone who already runs a mature task-management system outside Outlook.