Ms Office Tune Up

I mentioned at the beginning of the chapter that many Outlook users run the program all day, which makes sense if you constantly send and receive messages. However, many people rebell against the incessant interruptions created by email. They believe that constantly checking for new messages reduces productivity by inducing a state known as continuous partial attention, where most of your attention is on a primary task, but where you also monitor several background tasks (such as incoming email) just in case something more important or interesting happens.

The result is that many people now leave Outlook off most of the time, and they check for new mail only once or twice a day. When they need to send a message, they launch Outlook, compose the new message, send it, and then close Outlook again. To me, this seems like a great deal of work just to send a message. If there are some people with whom you correspond regularly, you can save yourself a few steps by creating email shortcuts for those recipients. When you launch the shortcut, a new Outlook message window displays. The message is already addressed to the recipient, so you just fill in the rest of the message and send it, which adds the message to Outlook’s Outbox folder. Note that all of this hap­pens without the main Outlook program starting. The next time you start Outlook, it sends any messages waiting in the Outbox folder.

Follow these steps to create an email shortcut:

1. Open the folder in which you want to create the shortcut. For easier access, I recom­mend using the desktop, the Quick Launch toolbar, or the Start menu.

TIP

If you want the shortcut to display in the Quick Launch toolbar or the Start menu, start by creating the shortcut on the desktop.To move the shortcut to the Quick Launch toolbar,hold Shift,click­and-drag the shortcut,and drop it inside the Quick Launch toolbar.To put the shortcut on the Start menu, click-and-drag the shortcut over the Start button then, when the Start menu displays, drag the icon up into the menu and drop it inside the pinned items area (the part of the Start menu that includes the Internet and E-mail icons).

2. 1 Right-click the folder and then choose New, Shortcut to open the Create Shortcut dialog box.
3. 2 In the Type the Location of the Item text box, type the following (where address is the email address of the recipient; see Figure 1):

mailto:address


Figure 1 In the Create Shortcut dialog box, type mailto:addressto create an email shortcut for a recipient.

4. 1 Click Next.
5. 2 In the Type a Name for this Shortcut text box, type a name for the shortcut. For example, type the recipient’s name or email address.
6. 3 Click Finish.

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