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How to master Outlook

Posted on 11 Mar 2009 at 16:03

Collect your ideas

Another founding principle behind GTD is to eliminate worry. We spend too much of our time stressing about things that are either out of our control or can be easily brought under our control, and one constant concern for people is keeping track of their ideas.

This could mean always having a paper notebook to hand. You have an idea, scrawl it down, and either tear out the page and throw it into your in-tray or - if you're out and about - keep it in the notebook. Then, at a time you set aside, go through those ideas and process them.

Or you can use technology. The record function on your mobile phone, calling yourself at work and leaving a voicemail, making a list on your smartphone. David Allen used to rely on a dictaphone for just such a purpose, but now uses online transcription service Jott (www.jott.com). "I can speed-dial Jott on my phone and it asks who do you want to Jott, I say myself, I speak and that will come back in my email in about five minutes fairly accurately - enough to act as a trigger to remind me what I need to do with that."

The beauty and horror of technology is that we have a huge choice of note-taking mechanisms. Quite aside from paper, or UK alternatives to Jott such as Dial2Do (www.dial2do.com), we can add tasks on our smartphone, record a message using its voice recorder, tap out an email to ourselves on our BlackBerry, phone the office number and leave a voicemail, add a new task into Outlook, using OneNote, and numerous variations to boot.

Although it's good practice to restrict yourself to a handful of mechanisms, so that it becomes second nature to check them, it's far better to use technology than to rely on your memory.

There's nothing inherently wrong with simply writing things down either, but if you're reading PC Pro you're almost certainly a signed-up technophile, in which case you'll already see the benefit of synchronising tasks between your smartphone and PC.

And if you're really committed to technology, you can dump your paper notebook and opt for a tablet PC instead. "The tablet PC allows me to capture handwritten notes directly into OneNote," said McGhee. "With the click of a button, I can transfer action items from my digital notes directly into the Task list in Microsoft Outlook."

Decide your categories

Microsoft Office and its rivals have long-supported the idea of assigning an email, contact, appointment or task to a category.

For instance, you might be working on four projects at work. Create a new category to match each of them and then assign away. Once you've worked through the process, you can then view all the emails, contacts and meetings concerning that project at a glance.

Indeed, categories are so powerful that some people can work effectively just by implementing a thought-out set of categories. One such person is Darren Strange, the UK product manager for Microsoft Office, who describes how he uses categories on his blog (www.pcpro.co.uk/links/174email3).

"Categories enable me to view my job as the management of six projects and to decide which one I'm working on at the moment," Strange told us. "This is a more focused and coherent way to work. Just munching down my inbox from the top felt like batting back balls from a relentless tennis ball machine."