When you receive e-mails you need to act on — but maybe not right away — consider turning them into tasks, complete with follow-up reminders.

For example, while you’re working on a report due tomorrow, you stop to check your e-mail. Some of your messages need attention, but you don’t have time to work on them now.

You could flag each e-mail for follow-up, but you might end up with an Inbox cluttered with flagged e-mails.

You could move all messages to a To-do folder, but by the time you get around to going through them, you will have forgotten why you put them there!

However, if you’re using Microsoft Outlook 2007, there’s a handy e-mail to task conversion feature that provides a third alternative that not only relieves Inbox clutter but also reminds you to follow up on those e-mails. To demonstrate, let’s say you received an e-mail about something you want to check out next week. Follow these steps to convert that e-mail into a task on your calendar;

1. Simply ‘drag’ the email to your ‘Tasks’ folder below your Email Folders, and it’ll open up a dialogue asking when you want to follow up etc.
2. In the Task pane, enter a day next week as a start date and end date.
3. Delete any part of the message that does not pertain to the task.
4. Click Save and Close.

Your e-mail is now listed as a task for you to complete at a later date. You can delete the e-mail from the Inbox, if you want.

So, ‘high-tech’ isn’t actually so difficult…