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Randy Holloway at Microsoft

Blogging from the field.
Which Outlook organizer plug-in is best?

I'm a pretty organized person by nature, but over the past few months the number of things on my plate (work at MS, charity work, writing a book, new baby coming in early January) has really forced me to rethink my approach to organizing my information. I'm getting about 400 e-mails a day, I have about 10 tasks on any given day and about 5-10 appointments, I'm reading nearly 150 weblogs (I pared the list down from nearly 500), and I have about 750 traditional bookmarks, of those I need to visit about 50 a day. The web-based information is one problem area, and I'm optimistic that coming search improvements will help me solve that one in the near future. For now, where I need the most help is with the Outlook-based information.

I read Scoble's account of a David Allen seminar a while back, and I know that Allen offers a tool/system called Getting Things Done. I also recently met Roger Merrill and he briefly talked about the FranklinCovey offerings. I also read a link somewhere about a tool called ClearContext. I'm not sure what kind of tool to try, so I thought I'd ask the readers for input. Here is what I'm looking for:

  1. A tool that is integrated with Outlook, that gives me "better" views into my appointments, tasks, and helps me to organize my mail.
  2. Something that understands how to track tasks against a broader project or goal.
  3. A tool that lets me install and make use of my existing information without having to enter too much additional data.
  4. Something that will let me uninstall someday if I have to. Because of our dogfooding practices, I need to make sure that I can uninstall this tool if it doesn't work with a new version of Office in the future.

So, any suggestions? I'll promise to look at every single suggestion, and if I find something new that works well I'd be happy to write up my comments.

 

Posted: Sunday, November 28, 2004 6:14 PM by RandyHolloway

Comments

CLRSQL- Technology and Current Events, Reloaded said:

If you have a suggestion on the best Outlook data management plug-in, please leave a comment here....
# November 28, 2004 7:18 PM

AJ said:

I use Getting Things Done, but I've recently started using Franklin Covey's PlanPlus. My favorite feature is the weekly task planner, which allows me to drag and drop tasks to plan the week. It is everything the Outlook "timeline" view should've been (I always wondered why I couldn't move tasks around in the standard timeline view)

I also like the Projects feature, which groups tasks into Projects and gives you the ability to organize tasks in a hierarchy.

The home page "dashboard" is useful... it combines your tasks, calendar, email, and a scratchpad all on one screen. I have a similar custom outlook today html page I made, but it's not quite as good as this one.

Installing PlanPlus has also created a positive side effect of the Outlook process shutting down completely when I exit the application (before that I would have to kill the 70mb outlook.exe process)

Hopefully I can use it along with Getting Things Done... I love the "Delegate" and "Defer" buttons in GTD. Creating a followup task when you delegate something is important. And moving things out of your inbox with "Defer" helps you focus on the things that you can work on now. I have some usability issues with GTD, like selecting a folder to file emails, but overall it is pretty good.

So to sum it up, I'm using PlanPlus to plan and manage my tasks and appointments. I'm using GTD to remove clutter from my inbox by using the Delegate, Action, and Defer buttons.
# November 28, 2004 6:44 PM

Jonathan Poon [MSFT] said:

I would also like to find out what your findings are.
# November 29, 2004 12:32 AM

Khurram Aziz said:

# November 29, 2004 3:02 AM

Annar said:

How about Taskline? It looks good for scheduling tasks.

By the way, would you mind tell us what RSS reader you are using? I also read RSS feed from lots of blog. I tried several RSS reader, and their perform badly when I subscribe to lots of RSS feed. : (
# November 29, 2004 2:39 AM

Randy H. said:

I am using NewsGator. I like its integration with Outlook, and I've never had issues when subscribing to large numbers of feeds, even though now I'm down to a smaller number.
# November 29, 2004 7:19 AM

William D. Bartholomew said:

I'm trialling Getting Things Done at the moment and so far I'm pretty happy with it (I read the book so I understand the system reasonably well).

For reading blogs I can't recommend Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com/) enough... It's a web-based reader with a great feature set. You can read your RSS feeds from anywhere and be completely up-to-date. I am so glad I gave up trying desktop readers.
# November 29, 2004 4:24 PM

MN said:

I am using NewsGator as well. The best part about using an RSS Reader integrated with outlook is that you can search using Google Desktop.
# November 29, 2004 10:00 PM

John Evdemon said:

I use both Newsgator and Getting Things Done.

GTD is a wonderful tool and does a great job at organizing and prioritizing your To Do Lists, Delegated Tasks, etc. Once you've tried it its hard to do without.

NewsGator is a great tool for keeping up with various blogs within Outlook. NewsGator also supports downloading embedded content so you can use it for Podcasts as well. I've heard that NewsGator also supports Atom but I've yet to see it work.
# November 30, 2004 1:18 AM

Owen said:

I've been using Getting Things Done for about 6 months now. It provides support for a model very similar to the Sally McGhee model for Outlook, with projects and next actions, but provides an integrated tool. I don't know of a tool that is closer to the McGhee presentations... I was a beta tester for the Covey tools, and didn't like it as much. The Covey tool seemed to take me "out" of Outlook too much. Have not tried ClearContext. I'm pleased with the Getting Things Done. It automates the multiple steps that you sometimes want to take upon receipt of an email (assign a task, associate with a project, file into a sub-folder...)
# November 30, 2004 3:18 AM

Randy Holloway at Microsoft Which Outlook organizer plug in is best | storage bench said:

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# June 14, 2009 6:06 AM

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# June 16, 2009 8:44 AM
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