How To Focus in Your Daily Work with InLoox (Part 1): Task Management

How To Focus Instead of Multitasking

It is often difficult to focus on the really important tasks. The telephone rings, the colleague is standing in the room with a question or new small tasks come nearly every minute - and you quickly lose track of what's going on. Without any structure, you jump from one task to the next so quickly and ask yourself at the end of the working day what you have actually done all day. InLoox can help you to prevent this. In this first part of our blog series about focused work with InLoox, you will learn how to concentrate on the important tasks and work through your to-do's according to their priority.

The goal is to organize your daily work with this simple approach. For this purpose, the daily business tasks are structured according to low, medium and high priority. With the help of a quickly compiled view, you can always complete the most important tasks first. You then prioritise all new incoming work assignments according to the same pattern and can see at a glance what you should deal with first.

How To Prioritize Tasks Simply

To easily prioritize tasks using InLoox, we proceed as follows:

1. Create a new custom field.
2. Add new custom field to task list.
3. Create conditional formatting.
4. Create & save view for high priority tasks.

1. Create a new custom field

In the first step we create a new custom field for the priority of tasks in the InLoox options:

1. In Outlook, open the InLoox Options by clicking on File and on InLoox Options. 

2. Click on Custom Fields and then on New to create a new type of custom fields.

• Name: Priority
• Location: Tasks
• Type: List (= dropdown field)
• Default value: Edit

• Default values: Low, Medium, High
• Allow users to add new items: The custom field can be edited later
• Allow empty selection: You can allow InLoox users to leave the custom field empty by setting a mark.

3. Click on OK >> OK.

4. The new custom field has been created. Click on Apply and OK.

2. Add new custom field to task list

1. Open the global task list by clicking on Tasks in the InLoox ribbon.

2. Open the context menu with the right mouse button and click on Select Fields.

3. A list with all available fields opens. This includes both native fields, which are available by default in InLoox, and fields created by the user.

4. Find the new Priority field and drag and drop it to the desired location.

In the next step, we will create a conditional formatting for the priority field. So that the result is immediately recognizable, you can now set the priority for some tasks. Double-click on the respective task and set the priority in the custom fields area. Do this for about three to five tasks. 

3. Create conditional formatting

Conditional formatting allows you to format both native and custom fields.

1. In the task list: Click Start and Conditional Formatting. From the dropdown list, choose Add Simple Formatting.

2. Define the settings for formatting via the page panel:

• Column: Priority
• Condition: Equal
• Value 1: Low
• BackColor: Select a color e.g. yellow
• Font: Edit font size, color, style

3. Repeat the second step for the priorities medium and high.

4. After you have done this, your global task list may look like this:

4. Create and save view for high-priority tasks

To get an overview of the tasks with the highest priority, it is best to create your own view for the global task list:

1. Click on the funnel icon in the Priority column and set the filter to High.

2. Click on the Due date field to sort by it.

3. Now only the high-priority tasks are displayed in the relevant order:

4. To access this view at any time with just one click, click Start >> Save >> Save current view.

5. Name the view: e.g. “High Priority Tasks”.  And decide whether you want to make the view available to your colleagues or whether you only want to use it for yourself.

6. The view now appears in the tree structure on the left side under Tasks and can be called up at any time.

Part two of the series: Task Management 

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