Tasks and Time Management in Outlook : Background

The electronic time management revolution will not be televised

mmacbeth — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 19:54:00 GMT

Here is a post from Hank Leukart about the Outlook 12 Calendar.

-Melissa

Over the past 15 years, paper-based communication has been replaced by electronic communication: quick chats have become instant messages, letters and memos have become e-mail, and reports have become electronic documents. While this change is something that most of us now take for granted, it happened in an exceptionally short amount of time.

The move to electronic time-management tools has happened much more slowly. People still used paper-based planners, Post-It Notes, and legal-pad to-do lists by the truckload. Nevertheless, we are sitting on the edge of a ground-breaking shift to electronic time-management; electronic calendars are proliferating across all consumer technologies, including the Internet, mobile phones, portable music players, and even wristwatches. In the near future, electronic time management will be as common as e-mail is today.

For Outlook 12, we wanted to give people the tools to become full participants in this electronic calendar revolution by providing a natural home for all of their time-based information. Outlook 12 also tries to help by automatically burning those Post-It Notes you have sitting around your desk. Just kidding. While the Outlook calendar has served its users well over the past decade, when we started working on Outlook 12, we knew that there was a lot of room for innovation:

We wanted people to be able to more easily interact with their calendar and scan their calendar for information.
We wanted to make it easier for people to view, manage, and share calendars.
We wanted it to be possible to manage both appointments and tasks in a single place.
We wanted scheduling meetings to be easier and more reliable.

Side-by-side comparison of Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007

Interaction and Scanning: The Outlook calendar has undergone a major facelift in Outlook 12 -- without the help of any reality-TV makeover show -- but the improvements extend far beyond the aesthetic. Nearly every element of the calendar interface has been evaluated with an eye toward making the calendar easier to use, easier to interact with, and easier to scan for key information to help users better manage their time. In a later posting, I will go into detail about how we accomplished this.

In Outlook 12, it is easy to e-mail all or part of your Calendar, with varying levels of detail

Viewing and sharing: Outlook 12 fully supports the Internet calendar format ("iCal"), which allows Outlook users to import and subscribe to a wide-range of calendars available on the Internet, including sports calendars, community calendars, promotional calendars, and holiday calendars. Finally, I can import the schedule for the entire "Veronica Mars" and "Entourage" television seasons with a few simple clicks! Outlook 12 also gives users the ability to publish calendars on Microsoft Office Online for the public or a designated set of people. In addition, Outlook 12 can send calendars by e-mail in HTML and iCal format, it allows read and write capability for Microsoft Sharepoint calendars, and it improves its already full-featured sharing capabilities when used with Microsoft Exchange Server.

The Daily Task List in the Calendar

Daily Task List: Melissa has already discussed the To-Do Bar and Daily Task List at length in this blog, but the important take-away is that with a single-click, a person can flag an incoming e-mail or click and type to add a task below his Calendar in the Daily Task List. From there, it's easy to arrange and reschedule tasks by simply dragging them to different days or weeks. You'd never believe how much more my boss likes me now with my increased productivity due to better task management.

The Outlook 12 Scheduling Assistant Tab in Appointments

Scheduling Meetings: When used with Microsoft Exchange Server 12, Outlook offers a scheduling feature that suggests optimal meeting times to a meeting organizer, helping him find times where all attendees can attend. Exchange 12 also features a new "availability service" that provides always up-to-date availability information to meeting organizers. Outlook 12 provides improved meeting workflow, removing the need for meeting attendees to always accept meeting updates when they have already accepted the original invitation. Finally, improved time zone support in Outlook 12 makes it possible to schedule a meeting from the context of another time zone and also provides information about attendees' working hours; both of these features make it significantly easier to schedule meetings across time zones. Hopefully, this will mean more exciting, exotic travel for knowledge workers around the world.

-Hank Leukart, Outlook Program Manager

Hank Leukart on Color Categories

mmacbeth — Sat, 18 Feb 2006 02:22:00 GMT

The following is from guest blogger and fellow PM, Hank Leukart. Enjoy!

-Melissa

Greetings! My name is Hank Leukart, and I am a Program Manager for Microsoft Office Outlook. I have worked on Outlook 2001 for Mac, Outlook 2002 (XP), Outlook 2003, and Outlook 12; I’ve been involved in designing – among other features – Search Folders, the Mail Views, the Navigation Pane (originally called The Wunderbar), date-based For Follow Up flags, the To-Do Bar, The Daily Task List, the new Calendar’s visual look, and Calendar Overlay. Today, I’ll talk about the new Color Categories feature and how it improves information and time management in Outlook 12. Then, I’ll brace myself for your feedback to learn how much you love or hate me (or more importantly, this feature).

During the time I have worked on Outlook, I have heard reams of customer feedback. I usually keep an Outlook Note (am I the only one who uses these?) containing feedback and feature requests to which I refer back when I’m thinking up new features. When I set out to design the Color Categories feature for Outlook 12, I found some of these nuggets in that little yellow Note:

“I wish I could label my flag colors!”
“Six For Follow Up flag colors is not enough.”
“I wish I could assign multiple flags or labels to an item.”
“I love coloring my Calendar!”
“I like to group Mail and Tasks by project.”
“When I want to label or file an item, it’s hard for me to decide whether I should use a Folder, a Category, a For Follow Up flag, or a Calendar Label.”

In my experience, software companies (including Microsoft) are good at adding great features to their products but not always as good at reconciling how new features work with existing features, sometimes resulting in a confusing mess. We usually do this for the right reasons – we don’t want to make anyone unhappy by removing or changing existing features they’ve come to love – but often the outcome is not optimal.

Outlook Categories are a great example of this. First, Outlook 97 had Categories and Folders, two features unrelated to each other. Most people used Folders for Mail but Categories for Contacts and Tasks. Then, customers wanted to be able to color their calendars, so we added Calendar Labels, a feature totally unrelated to Categories. Then, customers wanted to be able to follow up on their mail with multicolored flags, so we added that feature – also unrelated to Categories. Including Automatic Formatting and Note colors, Outlook 2003 gave customers six different ways to label or color an item.

Thus, for Outlook 12, my mantra was, “Simplify, simplify, simplify.” I imagined a world in which one feature could be used to label and color items of any type. That feature became Color Categories.

In concept, Color Categories are simple. With one or two clicks, you can add a color and text label to any item in Outlook. For me, my categories usually relate to projects upon which I am working. Thus, my Inbox workflow tends to work like this: 1) flag an incoming message with a date, 2) right-click on the message’s category column to assign a category that corresponds to a related project, and 3) arrange my To-Do Bar by Due Date when I want to focus on due dates or by Category when I want to focus on projects. I also categorize appointments with the same categories, based on which project a meeting is about. The same goes for Contacts; the people with whom I work on certain projects are categorized with the corresponding project categories. I even categorize my Notes by project. (I know, I’m the only one.)

Right click on category column to categorize an item

Some people I know prefer to use Color Categories exclusively as a way to mark items for later review. They tend to use the “Categorized Mail” folder to see all of their categorized items. Others use categories both to mark items for review and also to associate them with projects, which is possible because more than one Color Category can be assigned to an item.

Once you have categorized items, you can also search by Color Category in any module by typing the category name in the Instant Search pane. For example, you can type “Personal” or “category:(Carson Project)” to search for items to which those categories are assigned. If you’re feeling especially motivated, you can create a Search Folder for mail messages with a specific category by clicking File/New/Search Folder, selecting “Create a custom Search Folder,” then specifying the category as part of the Search Folder’s criteria. We’re hoping to make this process easier for Beta 2.

Search within a category with search syntax

Because I also have been involved in many of Outlook 12’s visual changes, some of my fellow Program Managers have joked that I am the “pretty colors PM.” Maybe for Outlook 14, it’ll be shapes.

Tip #1 for advanced users: you can assign a Shortcut Key to any category for easy assignment of your most-used categories. I use Ctrl+F12 any time I want to use my “Important” category.

Tip #2 for advanced users: if you right-click on an item’s Categories column and click “Set Quick Click…,” you can select a category that will be instantly assigned to any item when single-clicking on the category column.

More on subtasks

mmacbeth — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 03:46:00 GMT

In this release of Outlook, we considered adding subtasks, but decided that the primary problem that our customers are facing is that they don’t use tasks at all. Some might argue that this is because tasks in Outlook lack the hierarchy and sophisticated linking that some time management philosophies call for, but what we found in our research was quite the opposite: tasks were already too complicated, they were hidden away in an infrequently visited section of the product, they didn’t interact well with the calendar, and generally, they were too hard to use. We also found that less than 2% of our customers ever used tasks. We found this statistic to be incredibly sad given how badly people need better time management tools. To help our customers, we decided to focus on making tasks more prominent (the To-Do Bar), improve task interaction with the calendar (the Daily Task List) and most importantly, make tasks easy to create (easy task entry in the To-Do Bar and new task flagging.) Simplicity won out over additional hierarchy and complexity. Perhaps next release we will consider enhancing tasks to include subtasks and better hierarchical structuring to build on the system that we have built in this release. Thank you all for your comments.

A word about subtasks

mmacbeth — Sat, 14 Jan 2006 05:02:00 GMT

Let me start by saying that the next version of Outlook 12 will not have sub-tasks. However, there are some new ways around this. First, categories will be much more prominent, and people can use categories as the headers of their projects, for example "Garage Clean Up," "Errands," etc., and then sort the To-Do Bar by Category. Another tactic is to use a task as the main "project" task and then list out each of the subtasks within the master task. In Outlook 12, you will be able to use bullets and standard word formatting in tasks which will give you the ability to neatly list out your tasks and cross them off when you are done.

You can also use a combination of techniques: you could have a category called "Projects" where you list your "master tasks" that contain subtasks within them and then a list of "Next Actions" categories under which you can list your next actions (ala Getting Things Done, Take Back Your Life!, etc.) You could then pull out each next action from the master project task. As you move toward completing the overall project, the number of underlying tasks will decrease. Also, because multiple categories can be applied to the same item, you could apply both the project category and the appropriate next action category to the item. For example, if I have a task where I need to clean out my garage, which involves the following set of sub tasks:

Find rental truck company
Take recyclables to recycling
Take old boxes for donation to Goodwill
Sweep floor
...

I could create a task called "Garage Clean Up" with the list above as a bulleted list inside the task. I would then mark the task "Garage Clean Up" with the category "Projects" so that it appears in my "Projects" grouping in my To-Do Bar (which in this case, would be grouped by category.) I would then copy "Find Truck Rental" into its own task and mark it with the new category "Garage Clean Up" and the next action category type "@Online" since I will most likely find a rental truck company online. After I find a truck rental and set up the appointment, I will mark "Find Truck Rental" complete and then pull out the next task (or two in this case) from "Garage Clean Up" task, and likewise mark it with the appropriate project category ("Garage Clean Up") and next action category ("@Truck").

This is just one approach of many. For more sophisticated task management, I highly recommend Microsoft Project as the way to go - that is what it is for!!! And now Project tasks will integrate into Outlook, so you will now get the best of both worlds! For more on Project, check out the links to the right, including Dieter Zirkler's blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/dieterz/.

Tenets of task management

mmacbeth — Sat, 03 Dec 2005 07:49:00 GMT

Before delving into Outlook 12’s task management system, I want to describe my three tenets: reduce your To-Do lists to one; keep your personal and business tasks together in one place; and get your tasks out of your head. (These are not to unique to me, but come from nearly all of the task management strategies that were studied as part of creating Outlook 12's time and task management system.)

1. Reduce your To-Do lists to one (as best you can.)

First off, reduce the number of places you store tasks. Most people “receive” tasks and keep tasks in a multitude of places, including: e-mail, snail mail, hallway conversations, phone, meetings, your spouse, on your refrigerator, and the list goes on. The worst part is that many of us try to keep our list of things to do in our heads, and that is really no good.

Since I use Outlook 12, I keep everything in the To-Do Bar in Outlook and I use a SmartPhone with Oxios To-Do List to view my tasks when I am away from my desk. I find that this system works better than scraps of paper that can’t be up to date, can’t be rearranged, and are easily lost.

Here is how I get all of my tasks into Outlook. When I am in a meeting, I use OneNote to take notes, and I use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-K (works in Outlook too) to make tasks out of my Action Items - and now with OneNote 12, I can also flag my notes with the same result. When I am driving in the car, and something I need to do pops into my head, I follow Sally McGhee’s approach and I make a voice memo on my cell phone. When I get a chance, I transcribe my recordings into the task list on my phone or into my To-Do Bar. When I am in my office, I either type directly into the To-Do Bar or I hit Ctrl-Shift-K and enter the task into Outlook. Snail Mail? I turn them into tasks. Oh, and e-mail, well I flag it in Outlook of course!

2. If you can, keep your personal and business tasks together in one place.

Often I am sitting at work and I remember something I need to get at the grocery store, and just as often, I am at home when I remember something I have to tell my boss. By keeping one list of all of my tasks in one place, I know that I will always have my grocery list (currently the task is titled: Store) with me at the grocery and my list of topics for my boss in my weekly meeting with her. For me, trying to keep business and personal life separate is too much work, and it breaks rule number 1 – one list. Keeping one list that has both my work and my personal tasks helps me to keep a better work-life balance by forcing me to be more realistic with my time. This doesn’t mean that I don’t distinguish between personal and work tasks – I use categories to accomplish this.

3. Get it out of your head!

Keeping tasks in your head doesn’t work!! It is really liberating to depend on Outlook instead of your overtaxed brain for keeping track of your tasks. You can stop spending brain power thinking to yourself “Ok, remember to get Aluminum Foil at the grocery store, Aluminum Foil…” and instead you can focus on the activity at hand. And if you must, write down your tasks on a piece of paper, but copy into Outlook later: when you wake up in the middle of the night, with a burning idea in your head, write it down on a piece of paper and then copy it into Outlook in the morning, but don’t keep it in your head!

No scraps of paper to-do lists. No keeping lists in your head. Keep it all in one place – Outlook!

-Melissa

A word about Color Categories and Outlook 2003 Quick Flags

mmacbeth — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 05:23:00 GMT

I already posted this to the Beta1 newsgroup, but it seems appropriate to post here as well.

While people liked colored flags in Outlook 2003, for many, over time, the meaning of the colored flag was lost ("was green Carson Project or Drew Project?") Not surprisingly, we heard a lot of complaints about not being able to rename the colored flags in Outlook 2003. Also, there were not enough colored flags - Outlook 2003 is limited to six. Another problem was that there were different and unrelated ways of coloring items throughout Outlook 2003 - quick flags, calendar labels, notes, etc. With Outlook 12, we brought together these different ways of coloring and labeling items into one pre-existing feature - Color Categories. The feature essentially let's people name their colors, apply them everywhere, and the number of categories is almost limitless.

Another problem we discovered was that many people were using the colored flags in Outlook 2003 to mark mail as a task for follow up, these flags didn't integrate with the rest of Outlook's time management system. Some of these flags were date driven: "red means get this done today, blue means get this done this week," but other than reminders, Outlook 2003 flags were not date driven, so people had to manage their flagged mail and their tasks in multiple places. To help this scenario, we introduced date driven flags in Outlook 12. The new flags help to merge tasks that come in through mail (besides task requests) and regular tasks. In Outlook 12, the primary function of flagging is to make the item appear on the To-Do Bar where it can be managed along with other tasks.

-Melissa

How did we get here?

mmacbeth — Thu, 01 Dec 2005 05:16:00 GMT

In our research for Outlook 12, we* found that less than 30 percent of Outlook users use the Tasks portion of Outlook, despite the fact that during site visits, we saw that people desperately needed help organizing the action items they need to do. From our site visits, we found that people didn’t use Tasks in Outlook because a) inputting tasks was too hard, b) Tasks were hidden in a part of Outlook that few people visit, and c) the implementation of Tasks in Outlook did not provide a useful enough experience to compel users to visit it.

We then did research to figure out how to modify Outlook in order to help people to be more effective at managing their time. We looked at many different time management systems, including Getting Things Done by David Allen, Take Back Your Life! By Sally McGhee and her Microsoft training course, Managing Actions, The Organized Executive by Stephanie Winston, the Franklin Covey/Quest model, Time Management from the Inside Out by Julie Morgenstern, among others. What we found were some common themes:

Create lists of things to do and remember
Do tasks during scheduled time; set deadlines
Organize by project
Merge everything into one list

Several time management systems suggested ways to use Outlook’s existing time management system, but they seemed hampered, rather than helped by the technology. Thus, we tried to work out these problems by introducing the following four major feature areas:

Easier task input
1. Flagging: We modified flagging to make it date-based and in some sense, to force the question: “when am I going to get to this?”
2. Task Input Panel: We wanted to give people an easy, always-visible place to input tasks by typing a single line of text. Giving people a simple way to get tasks into the system helps people create lists of things to do and remember – instead of keeping it in their heads.
To-Do Bar (lightweight task management): We wanted to provide people with a way to see their upcoming tasks and appointments without switching context to a heavyweight task manager. To merge everything into one list, we made the task list in the To-Do Bar include flagged items and tasks. We also encouraged other Office applications to make task creation easier and they did – OneNote now has flagging that creates tasks in Outlook (OneNote 2003 had Outlook task creation, but now it is even simpler), Project now creates tasks in Outlook, and downloaded SharePoint task lists automatically appear in the To-Do Bar if they are assigned to you.
Tasks on the Calendar (time-based task management): We wanted to provide people with a way to easily schedule their tasks and look back on their calendar to see the full spectrum of what they had accomplished – with both tasks and appointments. To achieve this, we added the Daily Task List below the Calendar in weekly and daily views. Dragging a task from the Daily Task List onto the Calendar automatically schedules an half hour appointment to do that task.
Categories: We also modified categories, giving them color, and made them available on almost all item types (mail, calendar, contacts, tasks, notes.) The hope is that people will use categories to organize their tasks by project, but with categories, we retained a great deal of flexibility; categories can be used any way one chooses.

I hope that the new Outlook 12 time management features work well for you and I look forward to your feedback.

-Melissa

*I am using “we” in this post because I am not alone in doing the research for the time management system in Outlook 12. All of the credit goes to Hank Leukart, Jeff Smith, Glenn Frankel and others on the Office team.

Welcome!

mmacbeth — Tue, 29 Nov 2005 00:29:00 GMT

Hi,

My name is Melissa MacBeth and I design features for Microsoft Office Outlook. Specifically, I have been working on the task and time management features for the next version – Outlook 12, which has recently been released for Beta testing. For those of you interested in time management, there are a lot of new features that you will find especially useful including the To-Do Bar, the new time based flagging system, pervasive color categories, an updated Calendar with tasks, and the integration of tasks and flagged mail. More on those to come…

With this blog I hope to accomplish two things:

1. Provide some insight into how we came up with the Outlook 12 time management system

2. Provide suggestions on how to use the system; show users how to make it work.

See more posts coming soon!

-Melissa

P.S. Adding Technorati Profile