Lightning-fast search for emails in Outlook

This piece of (free) software is awesome ! If you use Outlook and manage huge PST files, you’ll love it ! I sure do!

Lookout is lightning-fast search for your e-mail, files, and desktop integrated with Microsoft Outlook™. Built on top of a powerful search engine, Lookout is the only personal search engine that can search all of your e-mail from directly within Outlook – in seconds…

You can use Lookout to search:

* E-mail messages
* Contacts, calendar, notes, tasks, etc.
* Data from exchange, POP, IMAP, PST files, Public Folders
* Files on your computer or other computers

Just enter your search and press enter. Results are instant. Lookout will find your search terms hiding nearly anywhere in your Outlook mailbox – subjects, bodies, phone numbers, addresses, etc.

I’ve tried it today, and a simple search in about 3 500MB PST files gave me about 350 results (files, emails and apointments) in 0.3 seconds !

Try it, it’s free and very USEFULL ! I dont know how I’ve worked until now without that software!

How I deal with high email volume

There are plenty of posts about emails overload at work, email organization, email productivity… There are even interesting blogs dedicated to the subject.

Actually, increasing email volume is a reality we have to face up. Here is how I try to deal with the «Inbox overload».

* Folders: I automatically organize inbound mail into folders: as I belongs to different email lists, I like to get inbound emails automatically classified based on the destinatory lists to which I belongs; I have a folder for each list.
* Thread (pre)view: I organize emails in each folders by «Conversations topics» (Outlook), filtering «unread email» only, and I enable the «2 lines Autopreview»: I get a fast preview of full conversations with unread (new) mail. That way, I can see rapidly the topic of each thread and if it has already been dealt with by any list member (generally a colleague). I’m able to fastly discard full conversations (possibly tens of email) in a minute — «mark as read» button is your friend!
* Snarf: I sometimes also use SNARF, the Social Network and Relationship Finder, from Microsoft Research: It let me see if I have new unread emails from people which I frequently exchange with. I can also fastly mark those emails as read and or delete them.

Towards a more efficient browsing on mobile devices

On one hand, web browsing using a mobile device can lead to having hard time, due to the inherent constraints imposed by the device itself — mainly physical constraints like reduced size.

Amongst this constraints are the following points:
* reduced size screen,
* reduced memory,
* reduced bandwith (when paying downloaded volume),
* limited navigation/scrolling facilities,
* limited user input facilities.

(Thanks to this article at «A List Apart» by Elika Etemad and Jorunn Danielsen Newth).

For that reasons i feel usefull to have a carefully selected list of fatfree-and-mobile-friendy web sites at hand. For example, in my case I use the following sites:
* Google Mobile,
* Gmail mobile,
* Google gateway to mobile friendly (I don’t know its official name)…

On the other hand, this mobile friendly bookmarks list will ideally fullfil the following requirements:
* be available from anywhere,
* be available from any browser (mobile or not),
* be short.

The first idea that comes to my mind to maintain that — reduced — list is to save it in my del.icio.us account and tag each entry using a special tag. In my case I’ll use «@mb» — for mobile bookmark.

The problem about del.icio.us is that, as far as I know, it doesn’t provide a mobile friendly version of itself.

Fortunately, Steve Rubel (Micro Persuasion) give us some tricks in its Del.icio.us Mobile article, to get a fatfree version of your del.icio.us pages.

In my case I choose to use the option 2 trick, reducing entries tagged with my special «mobile bookmark» tag: http://del.icio.us/html/adumont/@mb/?tags=no&rssbutton=no.

How can this be finally usefull: use that link (customized to your needs) as your favorite browser homepage will hopefully help improving your web browsing experience using mobile device.

Excel tip: some useful buttons

At work we use to share some Excel workbooks (systems inventories, and things like that). To avoid not being able to open such files because your coworker has already opened it, we always open them in read-only mode. The problem comes when you actually want to make change to the file!

Before we used to close the workbook, and reopen it, this time in read-write mode. Not very efficient, was it?

Recently I found those buttons available in Excel «customize toolbar» options:

* «Update File«: With that button, no need to close and reopen to get last changes made by your co-workers ! Just press the button. Like a «refresh-that-file»…
* «Toggle read-only«: This button reopen the file in R/W if it was in R/O mode (and the contrary if it was in R/W mode)

I found that buttons very useful. Couldn’t work without them now!

The 80/20 rule

I’ve learned a lot of things during my studies… I’ve also forgotten a lot of them. However, I remember some principles that were taught to me. Ironically, they had almost nothing to do with the academical studies.

One of those principles that I remember, and I always try apply is the so called «80/20 rule».

It’s best applied to reading. In that particular context, the rule says that 80% of the meaningfull content of the article/book/report… (whatever you intend to read) could actually be found in 20% of it, while the other 80% of the material will just give you the remaining 20% of the content.

I really trust that rule. It’s a really true *lifehack*!

It’s well explained in «A Quick and Dirty Reading Strategy When Time is Short» by Bert Webb. Worth the read!