Manage Your Life with Outlook®: for Dummies®

Chapter 10. Using Calendar to Keep Yourself on Schedule

The Calendar module in Outlook provides one of the most important means of attaining peak personal productivity and maintaining it in your pursuit of work/life balance. Because the Calendar module in both version 2003 and version 2007 adds basic task management to appointment and meeting scheduling, this module makes the perfect home base from which you can conduct all your Outlook business.

In this chapter, you discover the basic strategies and techniques for using the Calendar module to schedule all your appointments and meetings as well as keep on top of the tasks you need to accomplish on a given day. I hope that during this discovery process you not only become super comfortable using the Calendar's many wonderful features but also find the Calendar the most natural place from which to use Outlook as a full-fledged personal information manager.

Keeping Up with the Calendar Module

Although Outlook's Calendar module comes after the Mail module as far as using Outlook as your personal information manager, you can easily make it number one. This is because the Calendar module can provide you with a quick view not only of your daily, weekly, or monthly task list but also of the tasks currently on your to-do list.

Figure 10-1 shows the Calendar module as it typically appears in Outlook 2003. In the 2003 version, the program window is divided into the following three areas:

• Navigation Pane: This pane is divided into the following ...