Tasks and Time Management in Outlook : Time Management thoughts

Interesting PI article

mmacbeth — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 21:46:00 GMT

Saw this article in the Seattle PI this morning and thought it might interest some of you:

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/300740_msftinfomania23x.html

It talks about how we are all overloaded with information, and steps we can take to cope with all that we have coming at us. Have a look.

-Melissa

Outlook 2007 and Getting Things Done

mmacbeth — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 23:42:00 GMT

Every now and then someone asks about how to use Outlook 2007 with the Getting Things Done (GTD) /Take Back Your Life! methodology, which suggests heavy use of categories and tasks to manage your mail, tasks, and life. Here are some tips for getting started with Getting Things Done in Outlook 2007:

1. Categories – Categories are now unified across all of Outlook. To set up your categories, such as @home, @work, @phone, @e-mail, etc. by clicking on Actions->Categorize->All Categories. If you used categories in the past, your categories may already be set up for you. (When migrating between Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007, all flagged mail becomes categorized with the corresponding color category (e.g. Red Category for Outlook 2003 Red Flags), all Calendar labels become categories, and all categories that had been used on Outlook 2003 Contacts and Tasks are migrated forward. All categories that were never used (e.g. the “Hot Contacts” category) do not get migrated.)

2. To-Do Bar – The To-Do Bar, the panel on the right side of the main Outlook window, works much like the legacy Task Pad did. To best fit GTD, change the arrangement in the To-Do Bar to be Arranged By: Categories by clicking on the “Arranged By: Due Date” header in the To-Do Bar and selecting “categories.” Your tasks will now be arranged by category. To collapse all of the headers (category names), right click on one of the category headers and select “Collapse all headers.”

3. Flagging – In Outlook 2007, flagging a mail makes it appear as a task in the To-Do list. To make this work for GTD, set your default flag to No Date by right clicking on the flag next to a mail item and selecting “Set Quick Click…” In the dialog, select “No Date” in the drop down menu. This way, you can flag your mail to make it tasks without a start date.

4. Quick Click Category – Categories have now been added (made more visible) in mail and they now have color. You can apply a category to a mail item by just clicking (and right clicking) on the square box on the right side of your mail items. To make it even easier, try setting the quick click category to your most frequently used category, such as @ E-mail, by right clicking on the category square next to a mail item and selecting “Set Quick Click…” In the dialog, select your most frequently used category from the drop down menu. Now next time you click on the square next to your mail, you can apply your default category in one click.

5. Reminders – by default, when you set a due date on a task, the reminder is turned off in Outlook 2007. (We did this because the default flag has a due date so reminders would be firing all the time.) If you only use due dates rarely (i.e. not for the majority of your tasks), then you may want to turn setting reminders with due dates back on by going to Tools->Options->Task Options.

Now when you receive an e-mail that requires you to take some next action, you can flag it in the mail list view, then categorize it and then rename it in the To-Do Bar with your next action. If you want to get it out of your inbox, drag the mail to a project or other folder. Doing so will keep the item on your To-Do Bar/Daily Task List, but it will make your Inbox much cleaner.

When you are done with the task, just click on the flag next to the task to mark it complete. It will disappear from the To-Do Bar (completed tasks are filtered out) but it will continue to exist in the mail or task folder where you filed it.

If you want to schedule time for your tasks, you can go to the calendar and drag them from the To-Do Bar or Daily Task List on to the Calendar.

An alternative, and much faster approach is to drag the e-mail to the To-Do Bar under the category that the mail belongs to, and then drag the mail to the reference folder. In this way, the mail gets flagged, categorized, and filed for reference with two drags.

If a task pops into your head, you can type it into the To-Do Bar and hit return, and a task will be created. You can then drag it into the appropriate category grouping. (If you aren’t seeing the new item row in the To-Do Bar, you may need to reset your To-Do Bar and then arrange by category again.)

Let me know how this works out! And of course, please post other tips!

-Melissa

E-mail Etiquette

mmacbeth — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 04:00:00 GMT

Since starting work in Outlook, I have begun to think about the unwritten rules of e-mail etiquette and about how we could save each other a great deal of time, energy, and grief if we just did a little thinking before we hit the send button. Most recently, I have been thinking about how we could each do a lot to reduce the amount of e-mail that we send.

So before you send an e-mail think to yourself:

1. What is the recipient going to do with this e-mail? Do they really need all of these details? Are they just going to delete it on arrival?

2. Do they really need to be involved? Sometimes, you think someone might be interested in your e-mail, so you plop them onto the CC line (it is just too easy.) Other times, you want to just let someone (or a couple of someones) know that you are handling an issue, – and then they receive all of the back and forth of the subsequent e-mails where they get to watch as you handle the issue. If they don’t need to be involved from the beginning, then don’t send the e-mail – let them know separately that you are handling it and that you will let them know the result. (and then let them know the result!)

3. What are you asking of them? The more crisp you are, the more likely you are to get the response you want. If you ask a question in an e-mail that you are sending to more than one person and you don’t delegate a person to answer, you are less likely to get a response. Here’s a suggestion: when including multiple people in an e-mail put their names in bold next to the questions you want them to answer, and put each question on a separate line. Another tactic is to e-mail each person separately – you can’t get much more direct than that.

4. Is this e-mail too long? Long e-mails make my head hurt. Basically, consider how the person receiving the e-mail will react to receiving and reading your long e-mail – if the e-mail is so long that they have to set aside time to read it, then expecting a quick response isn’t realistic. If you are asking many different people questions in one e-mail, break it up into separate e-mails. If the e-mail is really important, and you can’t make it any shorter, than make it clear up front what it is you want them to do and why they should read the rest of your e-mail. One tactic I have seen is bolding the important parts for easy skimming. It can make a long e-mail readable.

These questions all boil down to: Empathize with your recipients. If you empathize with your recipients, your e-mail etiquette will improve and you just might send less e-mail. (The tone one takes in an e-mail also makes a world of difference - but that is a whole other topic.) And when you are the recipient of unnecessary e-mail, delete it! Don’t let someone else’s bad habits cause you to have too much in your inbox.

I know I am guilty of violating the don’t send it if they don’t need it rule myself, but let’s all try to stop the cluttering of each other’s inboxes!

How I work with Outlook 12

mmacbeth — Thu, 01 Jun 2006 07:19:00 GMT

Now that Beta2 is out, it seems like high time I explain how I use the new time management system in Outlook to manage my tasks and e-mail. There are many ways of managing one’s time, and what follows is just my approach. Fortunately, the new system is pretty flexible – though I will admit that I use all of the defaults (except setting my e-mail in conversation view in the Inbox for reasons I explain later.) I’ll begin with how I start my day:

I take the bus to work, which is great in some ways because it allows me to mentally prepare for the day ahead. Part my preparation is to look at my SmartPhone and see what appointments I have to look forward to that day. This exercise is followed by looking at my tasks. I happen to like using Oxios To-Do List because of the tidy way it displays my tasks. I usually enter a few more tasks on the way to work to clear my mind. As I enter these tasks, I try to make the first word a verb that summarizes my next action: Call John, E-mail Cathy @ UCEF, etc. This extra step of being careful when entering a task makes it easier to do the task later. It is no fun to stare at an item, knowing that you have to do something, and not knowing what to do next. When I get to work, I sync* my phone, which puts my new tasks into my Outlook To-Do Bar. (*I don’t have a data plan, so I sync over a wire.)

Next, I spend about 20 minutes going through my e-mail. I use rules extensively to move mail from distribution lists to other folders, so all of the mail in my inbox is something that I generally have to deal with one way or another. If I have to deal with e-mail sent to a distribution list (sometimes that becomes part of my job description), then I make it a task to explicitly deal with those e-mails separately in one sitting. When I go through my e-mail, I try to follow the 4-Ds – Delete, Do, Delegate, or Defer, and I file the majority of the undeleted portion of my e-mail to get it out of my sight. I also categorize some mail either “1:1 with Aime” (my boss) and/or “Feature Crew” when there is a mail that I need to discuss with either my boss and/or my core group of developers and testers during our weekly meetings (I also flag these e-mails for the days that we are going to meet.)

I “defer” an e-mail,

1. because I know it will take a while to read (i.e. longer than a page),

2. is something that will require a carefully crafted response,

3. is something that requires additional action from me, etc.

To defer an e-mail, I flag it. Most of the time, I just use my default flag of “Today” – with the knowledge that I will retriage the e-mail the next time I look at my To-Do Bar. If it is something that requires my time, but is less important, I will generally flag it for “Tomorrow.” If it is something that I want for reference that I know I will be referring to frequently in the short term, I mark it with a “No Date” flag so that it appears at the top of the To-Do Bar, and then I collapse that group until I need it. A recent example has been for common responses to distribution list questions. For instructions and other reference tasks, I drag the mail to the “Later” group which I created by setting one task to a hundred years in the future.

When I send e-mail to someone who I need a response from, I flag it for myself when I send it – and then I change the name in the To-Do Bar to start with “Follow Up: Name of person” or just “FU:” (though that sounds kind of bad now that I write it… J ) This way, I know that my next action on that task is to send another e-mail. If I am making a promise to do something, I always flag it for myself so that I have reminder in the To-Do Bar to keep my promise.

After I flag an e-mail, I either leave it in my Inbox, if I suspect that there might be more action on the thread, or I file it, if I am the next/last action. In my mind, if it was important enough to make it a virtual task, then it is probably important enough to file, and that way I have a record of my actions. As new e-mail comes in, I return to the 4-Ds, but looking at my Inbox suddenly becomes less daunting. I should mention that I leave my Inbox in the conversation arrangement, that way as e-mail arrives, the full thread pops to the top of the list.

Next I focus on the To-Do Bar, where I move tasks around to other days and give the tasks/flagged mail new, more appropriate names that more closely tie in with the next action. To rename a flagged e-mail, I just type over the subject in the To-Do Bar. Changing the name of a flagged e-mail in the To-Do Bar doesn’t rename the subject of the e-mail – it just changes the task subject. I then categorize some of the tasks to help them stand out – purple is personal, red is important/don’t move. I generally move tasks from one day to the next by dragging them from one group to another. Rearranging my task list is part of being honest with myself about what I can and cannot accomplish in one day. In some cases that means sending an e-mail to someone who is expecting a lengthy reply and I let them know when I can get back to them (and when I do this, I flag it for myself on send.) It is better to let someone know that you will get back to them by some realistic date than have them thinking that you forgot about them, when all the while their e-mail has been staring at you from your To-Do Bar giving you angst.

One of my co-workers, pointed out that in the Calendar, each of the tasks in the Daily Task List is about ½ hour long – which makes sense given that most tasks, be they answering an e-mail or paying a bill, take about ½ hour. So… if your task list has more tasks in it than there are ½ hours in a day, then there is no way you can get it done and it is time to push something off or just admit to yourself (or your boss) that it isn’t going to happen. Being able to say no is a hard skill to learn sometimes.

If one of my tasks will take a long time (e.g. “Write blog entry”) I will block off time on my Calendar by dragging the task either from my To-Do Bar onto the Calendar or from the Daily Task List onto the Calendar. If I have a lot of meetings, I will move tasks to other days – I know that I can only accomplish so much in one day, and meetings take time.

If I am in a meeting taking notes, I will take notes in OneNote and then flag my action items just as I do in Outlook – and they will appear in my To-Do Bar (yeah OneNote!!!)

When I prepare for my 1:1’s with my boss, I look back over the tasks that I accomplished over the past week (Tasks – Completed View) and then I look ahead in my Calendar to see what tasks and meetings I have over the next week.

This is just my system and I don’t expect everyone to work this way. However, there are some things that I have come to realize that apply to any system:

1. Make time for e-mail.

2. Make time for managing your time – this is a hard reality that any time management system requires.

3. Be honest with yourself about what you can realistically do in a day.

4. Be honest with other people about what you can and cannot do – they will appreciate it.

Now that Beta1/Beta1Technical Refresh/Beta2 are out, how have you been using Outlook12 as your system? Do you use Action Categories (David Allen/Sally McGhee) and arrange your To-Do Bar by category? Do you use the Start Date arrangement? Do you use the Categorized Mail search folder? The For Follow Up folder from Outlook 2003?

How do you work? What is your system?

4 Ds

mmacbeth — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 04:32:00 GMT

This is just a short post about a general way to deal with mail that many time management philosophies espouse:

1. If it isn’t important, delete it.

2. If it can be done in 2 minutes or less, do it.

3. If it isn’t for you or if you can, delegate it.

4. If you need to do it, but it takes longer than 2 minutes (including reading), defer it.

If you need it as reference (even if you have decided to defer it), move it into a reference folder. [Note that this philosophy is particularly well described by Sally McGhee in the following article: http://www.microsoft.com/atwork/manageinfo/email.mspx]

For task management, the hard things have been:

A) How do I defer it?

B) What do I do with it once I defer it?

Whole time management systems are built around answering these two questions. In Outlook 12, we introduced date based flagging (alternatively known as task flagging) to help customers easily defer dealing with mail. The rest of the Outlook 12 task management system is designed to answer the second question, which is really: how do I manage all of these tasks that I have deferred?

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