You may have noticed that I dedicate a lot of time to getting the most out of Outlook for my (and hopefully your) business – just look at the emails and blog articles I send you.
So I was abit surprised (confused?) during lunch when two of my friends (a lawyer and a real estate agent) commented that they do NOT think that Outlook’s Tasks and Appointments were SMART enough tools for their businesses.
They were both using Outlook but were frequently finding that when they relied on their Outlook calendar, they were RUSHING about in the last minute trying to meet DEADLINES due to INCORRECT entries…
These guys are both extremely competent highly professional people… if they were having problems then I was sure that many other people would be having similar problems.
So I decided to do some research… to try and understand what they actually meant… and hopefully find a solution.
Their problem was that they needed to enter a SERIES of related appointments and tasks into Outlook (sort of like a process)… based on the start date for the real estate agent and the end date (generally a court date) for the lawyer.
It was TIME-CONSUMING and ERROR-PRONE to do this by hand each time…
sometimes some steps were missed or entered on the wrong date.
The problem was made worse because invariably there was a change in a critical date which required RESCHDEULING of multiple items and… it wasn’t easy to find and change them all in Outlook.
It wasn’t uncommon to miss updating one or more appointments.. and unfortunately THE SIMPLEST STEP BECOMES THE MOST CRITICAL AS SOON
AS IT IS MISSED!
The good news is that we have been working on something that I hope to release in the next month or so.
But before we do that… we thought we better make sure that we were understanding the problem properly.
Could you give us a couple of minutes of your time to answer two simple questions:
1. Why does your industry need to enter a series of appointments (and
tasks) into Outlook?
2. What are some of the problems of doing this in Outlook at the
moment?
Please type in a quick response and send it to news@blog.standss.com
With so many readers, I can’t guarantee a personal response… but
I can guarantee that I will personally read your email.
That’s all for now… Wishing you a better Outlook.
Regards,
Sanjay Singh
P.S. I really DO value your input in getting things right. Why
does your industry need to enter a series of appointments (and
tasks) into Outlook? and… What are some of the problems of doing
this in Outlook at the moment?
Please send your response Now to news@blog.standss.com
I do accept as true with all the ideas you’ve offered in your post. They are really convincing and can certainly work. Still, the posts are very brief for newbies. May just you please lengthen them a little from subsequent time? Thank you for the post.