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! ;)

A few days ago, I resurfaced after a long absence.  I mentioned in that post that I have actually changed my GTD system (not once, but twice) since I decided that I liked GTD Tracks for my online GTD application.

I can hear you all from here….”What?!?  You spent so much time evaluating applications before finally settling on one and then you quit it already?!?”.  Yup, I can hear you.

Well, I hate to break it to you, but I just can’t seem to settle down.  I’m not convinced that this is actually a procrastination habit for me.  Granted, I’ve spent much time dicking around with this system or that system, or even figuring how to make an oldy-but-goody like Lotus Agenda work as a GTD system.  So, yes, maybe procrastination figures into it.  But I don’t think it’s the major reason.

Friction

I tend to switch GTD applications when they start irritating me.  I originally moved away from Outlook because I found it bloated and it didn’t do projects very well.  Since then I’ve forgotten how many systems I’ve tried.  Some I do remember.  I loved my text based system, but moved away from that when I got tired of the ugly text-only interface.  I really enjoyed Lotus Agenda, but found the keyboard-only interface restricting after a while (although they really knew how to do pattern recognition from what you typed in).  I tried Vitalist, but got tired of too much information in the main screen.  I gave FusionDesk a good workout, but found that doing a review was just too hard, and there was little activity from the developer.  Finally, I gave GTD Tracks a good go, but finally got annoyed at having my data online.  I was about to head off on a bunch of trips, where Internet access was not going to be guaranteed, so I wanted to keep my next actions with me.  Plus, I have to admit, the latency of a web-based application just about killed me.  I hate waiting; drives me crazy.

I understand intuitively that when I get bored/irritated/annoyed, I start looking elsewhere.  But I never really thought about it.  Until I was listening to a podcast interview with Kelly Forrister (Yes the Kelly Forrister from the David Allen Company).  It’s a podcast interview done by The Sassy Ladies.  It was a good interview, but something Kelly said made a lightbulb go in my head.

She was talking about her own system, and how she occasionally experiences resistance, or friction, with her system.  This is when your trusted system causes you some anxiety, and you start avoiding it.  Obviously, this is the kiss of death when it comes to actually Getting Things Done.  In Kelly’s case, when she starts feeling this resistance, she goes through her system and tightens things up, maybe rewords some next actions, etc.

When I heard this, I thought two things:

1. Wow.  Resistance!  That’s what I’ve got.  I resist using my GTD system because there’s something about it that’s not satisfying me.  That’s why I keep changing it.
2. Darn.  I wish Kelly talked more about her own personal system; I’d like to know if she made major modifications to the process itself, or if it was just a case of “cleaning” the data, so to speak.

Reducing Friction

There have been several topical posts crossing my feed reader lately that can help you tighten up your trusted system and hopefully reduce the resistance you’re feeling:

• Eight Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Goal Setting.  After reading this post, re-examine each and every one of your next actions.  Are they specific enough?  Are you using your Someday/Maybe list appropriately? Are you trying to accomplish too much?
• A Roadmap to Spectacular GTD Failure.  A rather tongue-in-cheek post, suggesting the very best ways of screwing up with GTD.  Some unhealthy behaviours you might be currently exhibiting: pushing the weekly review to a more convenient time, defining open-ended projects, turning your email inbox into your “trusted system”.
• 10 Ways to a Slim and Trim To-Do List: Part 1 and Part 2.  This pair of posts has great ideas for making your to-do list lean and mean, regardless of whether you GTD or not.  Great tips include: do quick and easy tasks *now* instead of writing them down, examine stale tasks, put reminders into your hard landscape instead of your to-do list, and make sure your next actions are *really* next actions.

My Plan

A couple of years ago, I moved away from Outlook for several reasons.  I was kind of bored, even the macros weren’t enough to stimulate me.  I didn’t like having my calendar and my next action list on two separate pages, I was eventually going to have to leave Outlook one day when I got a job, and it didn’t handle projects.  Mostly, it was just me getting itchy feet, so I started on a multi-year odyssey to find the perfect tool.

And where am I now?  Well, back at Outlook actually.  After trying other things and still not being 100% satisfied, and after seeing the new Outlook 2007 interface (oooh, pretty), I decided to just bite the bullet and come back.  First of all, I get uber-easy synchronization with my Palm, which was always a sticking point with other systems.  Printing is nice, dragging things around with the mouse is nice, the new calendar view that shows your hard landscape, and a chosen selection of next actions, is nice. 

I’d like to report that Outlook and I are doing fine right now.  It’s only be a few weeks, but we’re getting along quite nicely.  I forgot how much I liked having everything synced to my Palm!  Wow.  I’ve also been doing a little bit of scripting (no macros this time around - I don’t think I really need them), but a nicer script for entering new next actions (and appointments) from SlickRun.  I’ve even learned a couple of things that make my calendar into a truly wonderful hard landscape.  Of course, more on these topics at a later date.

So, I’ve gone back to an older, but well-trusted, system for my next actions.  I’m currently feeling no resistance.  The next time I start to feel friction with my system, I’m going to explore that feeling - am I itching because I’m bored?  because I’m procrastinating?  because there’s something about the system that doesn’t satisfy me?  or because I need to tighten things up?

I’d like to draw your attention to the fancy ad on the right side of my blog. Just over there —>. (Okay, those of you who are just reading the RSS feed, you’ll have to actually navigate to the blog to see the very fancy animated ad.)

Anyway, I just wanted to draw your attention to the CompanionLink trial that is currently being offered. The advertisement is about to run out, and before it does, I wanted to let you know that I’m using CompanionLink to sync my Google calendar with my Palm Zire 72, and it is *nice*.

You may remember that I tried out CompanionLink a few months ago, but didn’t have any joy. Even after a second attempt, I still couldn’t get it to work.

Well, this time, I had the undivided attention of one of their tech gurus (thanks Andy!). Between my sending in error logs, and their excellent support, we were able to get my system to work. And do you know what the problem was?

It turns out that I use a custom date format. Have for years. All of my hand-rolled backup batch files are tied to it. The custom format showed, for instance, “Tue 03 Jul 07″. For whatever reason, the combination of this custom format, combined with Google Calendar and a synchronization app (such as CompanionLink and probably gSyncIt and SyncMyCal as well) caused a major melt-down. The easy solution? Change my custom date format to a standard one.

Okay, it wasn’t a perfectly easy transition. Since I’ve been using my palm for years, and have alternated between using Outlook and the Palm Desktop as my conduit, I had a bit more trouble. It turned out that I had some strange recurring appointments that I couldn’t see at all, even when I tried using the Palm Desktop again. They weren’t even visible on the Palm. But CompanionLink would sync them to the Google Calendar, which would then proceed to throw a hissy fit. I ended up reinstalling the Palm Desktop, using a blank calendar to overwrite my Palm a couple of times, dancing around dressed in paint and waving a chicken bone. And then, things worked perfectly.

Conclusion

In my opinion, the best thing about CompanionLink was the customer service. And I’m a big proponent of good customer service.

The next best thing? It lets me sync to either Outlook (and then to Palm), or to the Palm Desktop, or to the Palm itself. It also offers support to other applications, such as Lotus Notes (which I hope to use one day), Windows Mobile, and even the Blackberry.

If you’re using Google Calendar, and want to hook it into your other calendar apps or hardware, check out CompanionLink.

I received an email a couple of months ago, asking what kind of tools did I use for different parts of my process. I’m finally getting around to answering those questions, mostly because part of my answer depends on information you didn’t have until I added recent posts :)

So, in answer to Fox’s questions, here’s what I use: (And sorry for such a long delay Fox!)

1) Email, do you use only web gmail interface or outlook with gmail pop3 ?

I use Gmail and I do all of my serious email work in the web interface. I have added a few extensions in order to make gmailing that much better, but to be honest, Gmail rocks right out of the box.

• Attachment icons, so I can what kind of attachment is with an email.
• Attachment reminder, to remind me that I said I would attach something, but forgot.
• Date Search, to make it easier to find emails from a particular date.
• Saved Searches, to save custom searches. I like this extension, but I don’t think I use it enough.
• Spam-count Hide, one of the first extensions I added. I *hate* seeing my spam count. I don’t care how big it is. Don’t want to know.
• And most importantly, GTD Inbox. This extension brings GTD in my email, with the addition of labels such as S:Next Action, S:Waiting, contexts, projects, etc. The thing I like best about it is that it offers a few shortcuts in my inbox so that I can jump directly to my Next Actions, etc. Actually, no, the think I like best is that when I’m reading an email, I can quickly label it with a status, context, and/or project. Very cool.

Note: all except GTDInbox are Greasemonkey scripts, which you can install one by one. However, if you’re not into Greasemonkey, you can use the new LifeHacker Better Gmail extension, which has combined these scripts (and more) into one easy-to-use extension. Better Gmail for everyone! As of writing, Better Gmail was at version 0.3 (3 versions in 3 days).

As for using pop3 with Gmail, I do use it, but for one very specific reason. I import my primary Gmail account into Outlook, just so that I can send the important mail straight to EverNote. I could do copy and paste from the Gmail web page, but it turns out ugly. Clipping from Outlook gives me pretty notes, and they’re time-stamped properly.

2) Contacts ? How do you keep them synced ?

Heheheh. This is one part of my system that I have not messed with in years. I’ve probably only got a hundred contacts or so, and the main reason for using them is to send a parcel or Christmas cards in the mail. My contacts are kept in Outlook, and synced to my Palm. That’s it. I have a few phone numbers input into my cell, but only the ones I’m likely to use.

3) Calendar? What do you use for it?

As I discussed in a recent post about my Super Duper Personalized Productivity Desktop Background Series, I use the Remind application for my calendar. It’s pure text. It’s geeky. It’s oh-so cool for me to play with. It’s possible for me to sync it (one-way right now) to my Palm, by first sending it to my Google Calendar. (Note: two-way syncing between Google Calendar and my Palm is possible, but right now, I’m not able to get from Google Calendar back into Remind format. I believe it is possible, but since it’s not an issue for me, I’ve not looked into it.)

4) Reminders ?

Reminders. That’s pretty open ended. I’m going to assume that this doesn’t mean things like next actions (for which I use a text system), but actual reminders, say with a date/time attached.

Well, that’s an interesting question. Let’s say I’ve got something I want to do every couple of weeks, but not necessarily on a specific day. (Of course, if it was a specific day, I would put the reminder on my calendar, i.e., hard landscape.) But I’m talking about things like housework, that needs to get done, but doesn’t need to be scheduled into a specific date. Until recently, I’ve been using recurring next actions in my text system. When the start date rolled around, the NA would become visible in my system, and stay visible, and annoying, until I did it.

However, I’ve recently started playing with a different method. I was finding that my NA lists were getting cluttered with houseworky things, that caused me to lose focus from the work I really needed to get done. So, I played around with Remind a bit more, and found a way to have recurring reminders that are only visible when they come due. They don’t show up in my monthly calendar view. But as soon as a reminder becomes viable, or doable, it starts showing up in my Today view, with a note of how many days until my self-imposed deadline. (That lets me see how slack I’ve been with my housework.)

There’s another kind of reminder though - an alarm. Let’s say I need to make sure that I leave the house by a certain time, but I know I’m going to be working up until then. I don’t want to be late because I forgot what time it was, but I don’t want to avoid working so I can just watch the clock. For these cases, I just use an alarm in my Yahoo clock widget. I could also keep Outlook running and make an appointment with an alarm. Or do the same thing with my Palm. The key here being that there’s some piece of software that will ding at a certain time, telling me to get my ass in gear.

So, that’s it. The other tools in my toolbox. Thanks for the question Fox, it was quite interesting to write all this out :)

There’s a fascinating new thread over at the EverNote Forum about “best practices” - how are EN users actually using their databases, how does EN make people more productive, etc. etc. If you’re an EN user, or are thinking about exploring it as a new tool, this thread is a great place to start for ideas on exactly what you can do with it. It’s not necessarily laid out in the most logical fashion - imagine walking into a room of people, all yammering about their favourite things. However, the enthusiasm of the users is most evident, and can be infectious.

But that’s not what I want to talk about. There’s a particular post in the thread, by marcclarke, which I found extremely interesting. Not because he was talking about EN, because he wasn’t. Someone noted that Marc is extremely prolific on the board, and how did he do that? Marc replied that he cheated, and proceeded to tell us exactly what he does to make himself faster/more productive, and what tools enable him. I loved the reply and asked Marc if I could reproduce it here. I think it’s begging for a larger audience, and I want to share his ideas with you.

So, shamelessly copied and pasted, and only slightly redacted, here’s Marc’s reply to the question “How do you find the time?”:

How do I find the time? I cheat. Shamelessly. Although I type at speeds well over 100 words per minute, I type only as a last resort. I use Dragon NaturallySpeaking v9 and a good noise-cancelling head set with a speech-optimized USB sound module to talk to my computer. Dragon will happily take what I say and transform it into text at about 180 words per minute, even on my little laptop’s modest CPU. The version of Dragon that handles Excel spreadsheets (as well as everything else out there) runs about US $200 these days, and anyone in the business world who does not use it is just plain crazy, IMHO.I can see that I am going to have to start another thread titled “The Pen is Mightier Than the Sword, and the Tablet is Mightier Than the Pen” or some such, to talk about how productive one can really be. I treat computers as nothing more than tools, just another chisel or hammer. I geek to live; I don’t live to geek. (I shamelessly stole that one from Gina Trapani over at the LifeHacker Blog.)

EverNote is the foundation tool in my tool suite, let there be no doubt.

The Getting Things Done gurus all seem to use Tablet PCs. I had a terrible time figuring out why. I thought it was just because a Tablet PC was a cool ubergeek toy. I was wrong.

One of the first people to really open my eyes was author Michael Linenberger and his great GTD book “Seize the Work Day: Using the Tablet PC to Take Total Control of Your Work and Meeting Day” and his GTD and Outlook-specific book “Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook: The Eight Best Practices of Task and E-Mail Management“.

I was listening to a podcast interview with Micheal Linenberger and James Keating (JKOnTheRun) and Marc Orchant. Both James and Marc are Microsoft Tablet PC Most Valuable Professionals (MVPs) and both hold Linenberger in high esteem. The interview was a real productivity eye-opener for me. Author Linenberger said that he wrote his books without every touching a key. He uses the Tablet PC OS’s voice recognition feature to capture his speech and then uses editing gestures with a pen on the Tablet PC in Microsoft Word to do all his mark-up and editing. Here was alpha-geek Linenberger blowing the socks of two of the most formidable alpha-geeks I know of (Keating and Orchant).

I have both written and edited a few large books in my day. I used EMACS outline mode and LaTeX. I thought I was one of the most productive authors anywhere in the world (and I have had publishers tell me that). I about fell off my chair listening to the interview with Linenberger. Here was someone explaining true high productivity to some of the most formidable high-productivity alpha-geeks in the world (IMHO). As I had both of Linenberger’s books on my shelf, I immediately cut an order for Dragon NaturallySpeaking and the optimized hardware to run it (noise-cancelling head set and speech-oriented sound dongle). I have never regretted it.

Linenberger writes his books using MindJet’s MindManager mind mapping tool, voice recognition (part of the Microsoft Windows Tablet PC OS), and a Tablet PC. He has a webinar on how he uses this combination of tools on the MindJet web site.

All the GTD and Tablet PC alpha-geeks seem to agree that one keeps three applications open on one’s Tablet PC all day: Outlook, MindManager, and OneNote. Personally, I have Outlook, MindManager, and EverNote open on my laptop all day every day. I think EverNote is even more powerful than Microsoft’s OneNote (though not as well integrated with Outlook, a minor problem that I easily work around by dragging links from EverNote notes to Outlook appointments, tasks, and contacts).

Microsoft claims that a Tablet PC is about 20% more productive across the board for an average user.

Quote:

“Results from post-deployment surveys exceeded expectations, showing that productivity improved by an average of nearly 20 percent per user. Longtime Tablet PC users reported much higher levels of productivity and were particularly impressed with second-generation technology.”

I tended to discount that claim as marketing fluff until I had a chance to play with a friend’s HP TC1100 Tablet PC. For the power user, I think Microsoft’s 20% number is low by at least an order of magnitude.

Mind maps are about an order of magnitude more productive than even the best outliners. In fact if you turn off almost all of MindManager’s brains you can run it as a classical textual outlining tool (and you can switch back and forth between the textual outline mode and the graphical mind map mode). MindManager understands the Tablet PC and pen gestures. My buddy with the Tablet PC can blow me off the map when we race making mind maps, me with my laptop and him with his Tablet PC using his pen.

For uber-productivity, you use a Tablet PC, Dragon NaturallySpeaking for voice recognition, and MindManager. You enter information from your brain using Dragon. You edit using the pen and the Tablet PC. You organize using MindManager. You capture bloody everything in EverNote. You do your e-mail and task management in Outlook. You cross-load projects and tasks from MindManager to/from Outlook. You schedule your day using Taskline.

As I said, I found Marc’s post fascinating, and quite inspiring. I’ve always wondered about a tablet PC, and decided that I probably would only use the tablet part for marking things up, like highlighting a document that I was reading, or maybe making a few quick drawings. In addition, I’ve always thought that voice recognition software was not worthwhile for me - after all, I’m a pretty quick typist, and pretty quick on the mouse too. But Marc’s experiences hint that I should rethink my position. I’m planning on checking out his links, and who knows, maybe, when I have more disposable income, I can think about ramping up my productivity with some pretty neat tools.