If you are working outside the US, you likely do not need to be prompted for an area code every time you add a phone number to your contacts.  I have used Outlook since the days it was called Schedule Plus (this is why we at Microsoft call it s+ when we send invites).  Even still, I have hard time finding the option to turn this off every time I repave my machine.   A second annoyance is that Outlook will remove the plus sign (+) you place in front of an international number.

The reason why this option is difficult to find in Outlook is because it is not set from Outlook. You will need to go to Control Panel, Phone & Modem and select a country.

For area code, I use 00 to represent the +1.  This resolves the second issue and stops Outlook from deleting the plus (+) prefix when entering numbers in Outlook.  That’s it!

How can you eliminate “noise” when you are reviewing emails?  One way is to turn your Outlook view into a photographic darkroom. You can change the view to darken the folder pane and task panes. This way your eye immediately can focus on the important content.  The critical content is bright white, whereas the chrome and secondary information blends into the background.

It is easy to set this setting. Go to File, Options and from the General tab, select Black as your color scheme.

When triaging your email, you want to fly through an inbox of 1000 very quickly. With the triaging technique, you can process 300 emails an hour. You can enhance that speed with a few more power accelerators. 

First, you can minimize extra clicks of the Delete key by auto-deleting meeting responses. Why bother saving anything that doesn’t have comments?

Secondly, in order to triage, most likely you are skimming and reading the email. This means the email is open in full screen. After reading an email in full screen, do you really want to return back to your inbox to only find that you need to open another email?  If you find that you are needing to skim emails during your triage, then choose the option to Open the Next Item after moving or deleting.

All these options can be found in Outlook 2010 under File, Options, under the Mail tab.

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