A few months ago, I posted about resisting your trusted system, and admitted that I had come full circle back to using Outlook for all of my GTD needs.
You may be surprised, but I’m still using it. It’s most definitely my trusted system. All of my important next actions go there; my hard landscape, repeating tasks that I need to accomplish, etc.
In this post, I just want to highlight a few things that I like, nay love, about using Outlook 2007 for my main GTD stuff.
Quick Entry
Unlike my first go-round with Outlook, this time, I’m not using any macros. In fact, I don’t even tend to create many appointments or tasks in Outlook itself. Instead, I use Outlook to browse, navigate, manipulate my appointments and tasks. To enter the information in the first place, I take advantage of the fact that there are command line flags that can be used to create Outlook elements.
Now, it *used to be* that you could use a command like
“c:Program FilesMicrosoft OfficeOffice12″outlook.exe /c ipm.task
To create a new, blank, task. Alas, when I tested this tonight, it was broken. It seems that a recent SP update for 2007 might have broken this. I’m not going to try and track down a fix, since I don’t use this approach anyway.
Instead of pure command line, I started off with a VBS script I found online. The beauty of this approach is that you can either double-click on the vbs file to open a new appointment, or use a keyboard shortcut, or my personal favourite, call it from SlickRun and pass it some arguments.
I’ve since modified the script slightly to allow for passing in the category that I want assigned to the new task.
Similarly, you can create tasks using a VBS script. I have a pair of scripts, one Perl and one VBS that I call from SlickRun. It allows me to type in:
@@ Call Travel agent re Vegas @calls d:25 Apr 08
and get a new task, categorized with @calls, and with a due date of this coming Friday. The point of the Perl script is to allow me to use whatever date format I feel like at the time, instead of forcing me to always use the 2008-04-25 format.
Formatting
One of the major things I love about Outlook is that you can format to your heart’s content. There is even automatic formatting. We’re probably all used to the concept that in Outlook, bold means you haven’t read it yet, and red means it’s important or overdue. But you can do so much more with the automatic formatting. For example, when I create a new all-day appointment that starts with “( )”, as in “( ) Pick up dry cleaning”, Outlook can colour that appointment red. Then, when I complete that tasks and put an “x” in the brackets, Outlook removes the colouring.
Similarly, I can customize my view(s) so that different contexts are shown in different colours. I have other rules based on dates: if the due date is within 7 days, the task is shown in blue. If it’s due today, it’s bold and blue. If the task cannot be started yet, I tend to hide it in most views, but if it’s a view that shows non-startable tasks, they’re shown in grey italics. Etc. etc.
Another formatting trick that I’ve recently discovered (thanks to Productivity Cafe), is to take advantage of the free/tentative/busy attribute of an appointment. To do this, right-click on an appointment, go to the “show time as…” item in the context menu. I use this with all-day tasks in the month view, but other combinations are possible. If an appointment is “free”, any colouring you have assigned to its category is confined to the task itself. If an appointment is “tentative”, the day it’s on is shown in striped colour. If it’s “busy”, the whole day gets blocked with colour. See the example below - is that not the coolest thing?
Week View
The thing that sold me on Outlook 2007 was the week view; this allows you to see a week in your calendar, plus, any tasks that are due on a particular day are shown under that day - talk about making your hard landscape easier! And, you can see another list of all (or some) of your tasks in a side panel.
Here is a view of my current week:
Some points about the view:
- green in the calendar is a birthday or anniversary
- blue is for hard appointments
- purple is for the gym
- I also colour code my contexts: blue for @home/@housework, green for @errands, yellow for @online+/@laptop+, grey for @online-/@laptop-, etc.
- as you can see, I haven’t done my weekly review yet - it was due last Friday; heh.
Other
Basically, Outlook gives me the opportunity to use quick entry (the quickest I’ve ever had, regardless of the system I’ve tried.) The advantage here is that since the VBS script accesses Outlook programmatically, you can create a new task and set various fields, such as “category”, “start date”, “priority”, etc. I’ve not tried another tool that gives me that much control.
In addition, Outlook is just plain pretty to look at. It pleases me to see my calendar laid out in it. It pleases me to see my next actions, organized by context, or by due date. It most definitely pleases me to be able to recognize instantly those next actions that I should be focusing on.
Outlook is a great way of coordinating my appointments and next actions with my Palm. It’s not perfect, e.g., the automatic formatting doesn’t translate to the Palm. Plus, I can’t avoid seeing non-startable tasks on the palm. However, it still gives me the opportunity to see what’s coming up, without having to do major contortions to get the data into the Palm in the first place.
Finally, Outlook offers a good API for developers to get their hooks into, so to speak. I’ve found a set of command-line tools that can allow you to query, and even modify your Outlook tasks. They were created by Dale Lane, and I use a couple of them to show my overdue and high-priority tasks on my desktop with Samurize:
As you can see, I’m awful at housework. But that’s not because I don’t know about the chores! ;)