Use Outlook’s “Notes” for communicating with co-workers

by Jen (June 10, 2008)

If you have a job where you work closely with others in a team style or where co-workers have to fill in for each other when someone takes time off, Outlook Notes is a great way to keep people posted on their projects. It’s also great for keeping yourself on track.

An example of when the Notes feature comes in handy:

A co-worker calls you and asks “Did that agreement for Client X go out yet?” Last week, you did your part on a dozen such agreements, and all of them went to someone else, who will do something and send them to someone else, so they’re all at various stages of completion and you only know they left your desk. Oh, and also, there were those two you handed off to a colleague because you were swamped and his workload was a bit lighter. At this point you can tell your co-worker on the phone:

1. “It’s not on my desk - that’s all I know.” Accurate, but not helpful. And what if it never actually made it to your desk? Your co-worker will spend valuable time asking the next people down the line from you if they have it, only to find out it got hung up with someone who was supposed to have it before you. This can make you look bad.
2. “Let me find out.” Helpful and appreciated, but now you have to spend valuable time asking everyone who might possibly have touched this thing if they have it. And chasing them down when they don’t bother to respond.

Or if you use Notes and remember to jot down things you’ve done, you can just check them and immediately tell your co-worker precisely what you did with that agreement so they know where to start looking next.

Additionally, when someone’s filling in for you next and will have an even harder time guessing whether that agreement went out, they can just check your notes - if you’ve set up “permissions” for them. Here’s how it all works in Windows:

Type Ctrl+5 to enter the Notes screen of Outlook. There are icons to click, too, for you mouse lovers, but since there’s no telling where they’ll be on your Outlook (the screen can be configured several ways), I’ll just give you the keyboard shortcuts for now. Here’s the Notes screen:

My notes in red tell most of the story. Your notes on what you’ve been doing are the little sticky-note icons on the right pane of the screen. In the left sidebar, you have a list (which I’ve blurred for privacy) of people who have “shared” their notes with you. And below that, you have links to click so you can set up sharing.

Sharing

1. Click “Share My Notes” to select who has access to your notes.
2. This gives you a pop-up window: click the “Permissions” tab.
3. Click the “add” button in the middle and select the co-workers you want to be able to access your notes just like you would select the recipients on an email.
4. Click one of those people’s names in the box near the top of the pop-up window. From the drop-down box beside “Permission Level” choose a level. The check boxes and radio buttons below will tell you what each level means - what the person will be able to do with your Notes. I want my co-workers to be able to edit my notes, but I don’t want them deleting anything. So I chose “Editor”, and then altered the default “delete” permission from “all” to “none”, which it saved as a “custom” permissions setting. Now the co-workers I’ve chosen can edit my notes (so I’ll know what they did when I get back) but they can’t delete anything they believe to be finished (but might not know the whole story).
5. Repeat Step 4 for each co-worker.
6. Make sure your co-workers understand the system, have permissions for you and each other set up correctly, and are on board with using it.

You can organize your Notes any way you like. You can have one gigantic note for each project, featuring all the items you want to track about it. Or you can have smaller notes. It depends how people ask you for information: do they ask about a specific client, or project, or type of document? The top line of your Note will become the title, so it should convey what you’d want to know if you were asked about the information that Note contains.

Using the Notes

The Notes themselves are pretty self-explanatory. You just double-click on the Note pane and start typing inside the Note pop-up (which looks like a sticky note with an X in the upper right for closing the window. A few remarks, however:

• You don’t have to save notes. They’re saved as you type. When you’re done typing, click the X in the right upper corner (or hit Alt-F4) to close the window, and it will appear as an icon with a title in your Notes pane. Double click it to access it again.
• Erasing the content of the Note won’t delete it. You have to select it and hit your Delete button.
• You can email someone any or all of your Notes.
• You can change the size of the icons and other ways you view the Notes system.

It’s also a good idea to have some discussions with your co-workers so you’re all keeping Notes in ways that make sense to everyone, and so everyone feels like they know what they’re doing with them.

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