When helping people to work smarter on their conflicting priorities, I usually help them to work smarter with their office software and smartphones as well. After all, most of their communications and commitments flow through these tools. Here’s an Outlook Calendar productivity tip that has proved very popular recently. Its popularity came about as people mailed me in response to my World Cup Football Calendar tip  and people wanted to know how it worked in a separate World Cup Calendar subfolder. This tip only works with Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 though.The tip is to view your various Outlook Calendars in Overlay mode whenever you want to. Here’s how:

  1. Go to your main Outlook Calendar folder
  2. Select the calendars you wish to view, the default position is to see these calendars side-by-side.
  3. To see the commitments in all calendars within one calendar you need to engage ‘View in Overlay mode’
  4. Do this by clicking the small arrow on the left of the title in the secondary calendar.

How to use Outlook Calendar overlay mode

You can reverse this clicking the arrow again. Simple!

How could you use this Microsoft Outlook Calendar functionality to support your productivity? Why not let me know? If you want to move beyond tips and get into sustainable, measurable productivity improvements and work smarter on your priorities and technology tools just ask us now and we will get back to you.

I attended one of Richard’s courses on time management using Outlook and our current trend to urgency addiction. The results from attending the course were for me immediate, I am more organised, more focused and more in control and I am very grateful to him for the wisdom he imparted. If you’re considering engaging with Richard take my word for it and don’t hesitate to go for it!
Robert May MD Ramsac Ltd