Each Day Empty
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Each Day Empty
How to quickly and efficiently process your e-mail in Microsoft Outlook
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Each Day Empty This layout is created for double-sided printing.
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/Introduction
Taco Oosterkamp
Each Day Empty
© Copyright 2005-2009 2005 by moreeffect. All rights rreserved. All copying prohibited.
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www.eachdayempty.com eachdayempty.com © Copyright 2005 - 2009 by moreeffect, www.moreeffect.eu All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. International Standard Book Number: 978-90-79421 978 79421-05-3 January 2009 Microsoft, Outlook and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Each Day Empty is a trademark of moreeffect. Warning and Disclaimer Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and as accurate as possible, but no warranty or fitness is implied. The information provided is on an "as is" basis. The authors and the publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book. Bulk Sales moreeffect offers excellent discounts on the printed edition of this book when ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales. For more information please contact [email protected] phone +31-343 343-421381 Each Day Empty was previously sold as 'The Happy Outlook Book'.
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/Introduction
1. Introduction Introduction During g the last ten years, I have organized my work, life and email with Microsoft Outlook. Right now, I wouldn’t know of another program that would allow me to do it just as easily. Yes, I’m a happy Outlook user. But during uring my work (I train professionals in working smarter), I encounter many people who are burdened by full e-mail inboxes, incomplete and sloppy task lists and a general sense of failure when it comes to managing all the information in their work and lives. live I also see many people using Outlook very inefficiently. This in itself is a problem, because working with a tool that is not efficient adds a lot of stress, not to mention tardiness to the whole process of managing e-mail.. This book ook strives to tell you you how to setup Outlook for maximum efficiency, but also teaches you how to integrate the Getting Things Done methodology in Outlook. The book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen has had a major impact on my own work. Much of what you’ll read in this Book Bo is inspired by his philosophy of working smarter. I’m much obliged to David Allen (http://www.davidco.com http://www.davidco.com), but because of http://www.davidco.com), readability, I will not refer to him constantly. I hope that this book b will give you a boost in processing and organizing your life. And if you’re looking for more, you can always check my weblog with tips at www.eachdayempty.com Taco J. Oosterkamp Each Day Empty
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Table of Contents
2. Table of Contents 1.
Introduction ............................................................ 5
2.
Table of Contents ................................................... 7
3.
What Are We Going To Do? .................................. 9
4.
Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind? ..................................................................... 11
5.
Navigation Pane ................................................... 17
6.
How To Quickly Process E-mail .......................... 19
7.
Setup Folders ........................................................ 23
8.
Create Shortcuts to Folders ................................ 33
9.
Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency ............................................................................... 41
10.
Processing Your E-mail to Empty the Inbox ..... 49
11.
Fill Your Waiting For List With [w] ..................... 75
12.
Working From Your Lists ..................................... 87
13.
Folders, Items and Views .................................... 91
14.
Setup Views For a Folder .................................... 95
15.
Weekly Review .................................................... 119
16.
Search .................................................................. 121
17.
Optimizing Outlook For Speed ......................... 125
18.
Setting Up Archives ........................................... 129
19.
Stop Using Your Mouse ..................................... 133
20.
Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them ......................... 135
21.
Working With a Smartphone ............................ 141
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22.
Deadlines and Your Calendar ........................... 143
23.
Using the Tadaaa List ........................................ 145
24.
Sheet workflow diagram ................................... 147
25.
Shortcut Keys ..................................................... 149
26.
Books and Other Resources ............................. 151
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What Are We Going To Do?
3. What Are We Going To Do? This book contains a bit of theory, but mostly step-by-step instructions on how to setup and use Outlook most efficiently. It focuses on processing e-mail and is based on the Getting Things Done principles.
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After a warning about the Navigation Pane, we’ll
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We’ll quickly move to set up some extra folders that
cover a little bit of theory on emptying your e-mail inbox.
we need in Outlook. Don’t worry: I’ve explained all the steps you need to take in detail, with screenshots to
guide you through it all.
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As soon as we can, we’ll learn how to actually empty the inbox. I’ll explain the decisions you’ll have to make and the actual keys to efficiently process any e-mail that
comes your way.
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And finally, we’ll talk about working from your lists and a whole lot of other smart things to do when working with Outlook.
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Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind?
4. Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind? Last year I was interviewed by business magazine Managementteam about workload and keeping your mind clear. Keeping a clear mind: it may seem impossible but in practice it is a real boost for your effectiveness and creativity.
4.1.
A clear mind reduces stress
Today's work is totally different than work in the past. Working on an assembly line is different from working with your brains. Assembly line workers don't have much influence on their work and they literally see their work passing by on the assembly line. Workers in the knowledge sector, on the other hand, are dealing with mental processes. Assembly line workers don't take their work home but most knowledge workers find it difficult to stop thinking about their work. There seems to be no escape and switching off is quite hard. By the way, when is your work actually finished? When are you 'done'? When have you polished the e-mail to perfection? How brilliant is your ideal proposal? When are your ready to say you have reached the ultimate decision? When a farmer is milking a cow, she knows when she is finished. But most knowledge-driven processes are far less clearly defined.
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In the meantime, you have an overload of thoughts. And that barrage of thoughts may very well interfere with more important issues. All your recent appointments, projects, ideas, priorities and promises each take up space in your mind. When we, at moreeffect, coach professionals we can easily make hundreds of 'loose ends' come to the surface. All those pieces of information demand a little bit of attention. Many of these thoughts only come to the surface at the most inconvenient moments. You are writing a proposal for a new project and suddenly it crosses your mind that you need to call the contractor for your house. You are doing your shopping at the supermarket and meanwhile you are worrying about tomorrow's meeting. Many people are no longer aware of how often they think of things they cannot do anything about at that particular moment. But every disruptive thought causes a little stress. And all those loose ends together cause a lot of stress. Unnecessary stress.
4.2.
A clear mind is more reliable
You cannot rely on your subconscious mind when organizing your work and life. In bed you suddenly remember that you promised to call a client. Oops forgotten! And when you wake up the next day you have forgotten it again. Your subconscious triggered the appropriate thought 'phone client' but at the wrong moment. Late in the afternoon yesterday would have been more practical because then you could still have phoned the client.
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Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind?
When you constantly think of things at the wrong moment you cannot be trusted to keep your appointments and deliver on your promises. Reliability is important because in the end life and work is all about people and relationships. And people will know whether they can rely on you. It will harm your relationships if you repeatedly break your promises, are slow in replying to emails, and lose grip on your work. All this causes even more stress. But don't even try and get the overload in your mind organized. Your mind is not made for this. By using a smart system (on paper or on the computer) that keeps track of all your appointments, promises, goals and actions you clear your subconscious mind, making room for lucidity and creativity. Outlook is a good system to achieve this. There are other possibilities, but this is a good option. Your subconscious won't give up easily. It will continue to interfere with the details of your life until it knows that you have a foolproof, external system that helps you get organized. Only then will your subconscious stop bothering you at the wrong moments. As soon as you have such a foolproof, external system set up, your head will become clear again and you will become more reliable at the same time. It is better for you and the people around you and your performance at work will improve.
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4.3.
A clear head makes it easy to organize your work and life
Overload makes it difficult to keep track of everything that is going on. Your subconscious can't prioritize. As David Allen says, an unsatisfactory telephone conversation might feel more important than the takeover of an entire company. How to set priorities is a question I have often been asked. The key problem with priorities is that you first need to list all the options available to you. Your subconscious is likely to be crammed with all kinds of things that need to be done; projects, plans and other activities. Every item triggers a specific emotion, but that does not really help when determining what needs to be done first. To set the right priorities you will need to consciously consider the importance of each item with regard to your life and your work. A total overview is essential. Using a good, reliable, external system does not only make you more reliable but it also provides a total overview of what is going on. And then all of a sudden you are able to set priorities.
4.4.
A clear head is more creative and more effective
The capacity of your mind is limited: the to-do list suppresses creativity. It is like the memory capacity of your computer: the short-term memory (RAM) has a limited storage capacity. You create RAM capacity when the data you don't need at that moment are saved on your hard disk. When you need those data again you retrieve them from your hard disk.
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Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind?
Similar processes take place in your head. By saving your entire to-do list in a fully reliable, external system, you create free space for creativity. And as a result your solutions will be smarter, your competitive strength and job satisfaction will increase. A clear head creates capacity to focus on what is really important in your job and life.
4.5.
A clear mind facilitates 'flow'
A clear head helps to concentrate better. And concentration is important to achieve 'flow'. A term coined by professor Csikszentmihalyi to indicate those moments when individuals are performing at their best. Try and think of the last time you lost all awareness of time, when you were totally absorbed by your work, solved complicated problems without any effort and felt highly effective. That is flow. Concentration and focus are very important to achieve flow. Uncoordinated thoughts about all kinds of things that need to be done disturb the flow that is so crucial to being effective. When you have an adequate, external system in place, it is easy and simple to store those thoughts to be looked at later. This is how you keep your head clear. With a clear head it is much easier to concentrate and get into the flow.
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4.6.
Who wants a mind full of thoughts?
Can a very busy person relax in a hammock, with a clear mind? Can you sleep at night knowing that there is lot of work waiting for you in the morning? Can you be very effective and be relaxed at the same time?
Yes indeed. All of this is possible. So why wouldn't you want it? Keeping a clear head is highly recommended. You become more reliable, you concentrate better, you are more effective, you stimulate your own creativity and you are less stressed out. The Getting Things Done methodology by David Allen offers a very practical guideline to achieve this. I was skeptical at first but after trying it out for a few weeks my head became clearer and I was calmer. Words cannot describe how good this feels. Since then, my team at moreeffect has inspired, trained, and coached thousands of people in working smarter with this method. This book is about using Microsoft Outlook as an adequate, swift, reliable external system. The tips are based on my own experience and the experience of hundreds of our clients.
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Navigation Pane
5. Navigation Pane WARNING
— Since Outlook 2007, you can hide or display the
Navigation Pane (at the left side of the Outlook window) by clicking Alt+F1. Hiding the Navigation Pane may cause you to not see the Folder List, or the Shortcuts that we will use in this book. For instance, if you press Ctrl+6 to display the Folder List and you don’t see it, please keep pressing Alt+F1 until the Navigation Pane appears again. The Navigation Pane
OUTLOOK 2007
Ctrl+F1 toggles the Ribbon, Alt+F1 toggles the Navigation Pane, Alt+F2 toggles the To-Do Bar
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How To Quickly Process E-mail
6. How To Quickly Process E-mail If you want clarity and an empty inbox, you’ll need to make a few decisions about each e-mail. Let’s try to summarize the basics of processing stuff, but then apply it to e-mail. 1. E-mail is collected automatically in your inbox. 2. To empty your inbox daily, you’ll have to make a conscious decision about each e-mail: a. Delete it from your inbox or b. Move it to another folder for further processing 3. Making decisions takes time and energy, so we’ll try to make these decisions as easy as possible. There are eight possible destinations for each e-mail: a. Recycle bin – the e-mail can be deleted b. Archive – there is no action associated with the e-mail, but I do not want to delete it either c. Someday/Maybe folder – there is an action associated with the e-mail, but I’m not going to take that action this workweek d. Two minute rule – I can complete the action within two minutes e. Calendar – the action (or information) in the email is date and/or time bound.
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f. Waiting For – I can delegate the required action, or there is no action on my part, I’ll just have to wait for someone else to take action g. Next Actions folder – I’ll have to take the next action myself, and I plan to do this action during this workweek h. Projects – this is a list of all projects that are currently active in your work or life
Projects list When an Expected Outcome needs more than one action, it is called a project. There are many different ways to track Projects – I myself use a mind map for that purpose. I create and maintain that mind map in FreeMind, which you can download from http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ I started out with a Projects folder in Outlook, so for anyone who wants to do that too, I’ll explain how to create a Projects folder in Outlook in Chapter 20. You don’t need to setup anything for deleting e-mails, or for the two-minute rule. The calendar is available by default and we’re going to use the default Tasks folder as the Next Actions folder. This leaves us with four new folders to create, which we will do in the next chapter: 1. Archive 2. Someday/Maybe 3. Waiting For 4. Projects
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How To Quickly Process E-mail
In addition to these four folders, you may want to setup a Tadaaa folder and an Ideas folder (see paragraph 21.2). People often use a Tadaaa folder to move completed items from their Task list to. This gives you a sense of accomplishment if you see at the end of the day how much you actually accomplished. There are many different ways to setup a proper e-mail archive. More discussion can be found in Chapter 18: Setting Up Archives.
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Setup Folders
7. Setup Folders 7.1.
Create New Folders
As discussed in chapter 0, we need to create a few extra folders in Outlook. This chapter shows you step-by-step how to create these folders. While setting up Outlook, we will create a few folders of type Task Items. This type of folder is much easier to work with on a daily basis than folders of type Mail and Post Items. In a Task folder, you can easily modify the subject and other properties of a task. It is much easier to add an item to a Task folder than it is having to compose an E-mail or Post for a Mail and Post folder. Chapter 18 contains more fundamental information on working with folders and items in Outlook.
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7.2.
Create the Archive Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “Archive” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Mail and Post Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. That item can be named “Personal Folders”, “Mailbox – Your Name” or any other name. The name doesn’t matter; it’s the topmost position in the hierarchy that counts. 5. Press the OK button
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Setup Folders
Creating the Archive folder, of type Mail and Post Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
Note: the name of the root folder “Personal Folders” doesn’t matter. We select this topmost (root) folder as the parent for our new folder, because that makes it much easier to quickly select that folder when copying or moving items (like e-mails) to it.
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7.3.
Create the Someday/Maybe Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “Someday/Maybe” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Task Items” from the dropdown box – this is different from the Archive folder! 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. 5. Press the OK button
Creating the Someday/Maybe folder, of type Task Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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Setup Folders
7.4.
Create the Waiting For Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “Waiting For” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Task Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. 5. Press the OK button
Creating the Waiting For folder, of type Task Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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7.5.
Create the Projects Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “Projects” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Task Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. 5. Press the OK button
Creating the Projects folder, of type Task Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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Setup Folders
7.6.
Create the XTadaaa Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
We call this folder XTadaaa to make sure it has a different first letter from the Tasks folder. The first characters of each name are used later to quickly navigate to a folder.
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “XTadaaa” as name of the new folder to make sure that it has a different first letter from the Tasks folder 3. Choose “Task Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. 5. Press the OK button
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Creating the XTadaaa folder, of type Task Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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Setup Folders
7.7.
Check Your Newly Created Folders
To check if all folders have been created properly, we’ll look for the newly created folders in the Folder List. Press Ctrl+6 to display the Folder List.
(+6
Display all folders in the Folder List
If all has gone well, you should see your new folders in this list, as shown in the next screenshot:
Ctrl+6 displays all folders, after creating the new folders
The icons indicate that the new Archive folder is an E-mail and Post item folder ( item folders (
), and that the other new folders are Task
). This is exactly how we want it.
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We will do more customization of our folders in later chapters, but in this book I want to move to the practical day-to-day reality as soon as possible.
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Create Shortcuts to Folders
8. Create Shortcuts to Folders 8.1.
Why Do We Need Shortcuts?
We need to define our own Shortcuts for a better overview over our work and life. Since Outlook 2003, the default view of the Navigation Pane shows all folders together of the same type. For instance, pressing Ctrl+1 displays only E-mail and Post Item folders, while pressing Ctrl+4 displays all Task Item folders:
Pressing Ctrl+4 displays all Task Item folders
For a better overview, we want to display folders of different types in one overview, but we do not want all folders to appear, as Ctrl+6 does. This view often includes many folders we do not need on a day to day basis, like for instance the Deleted Items folder. By using Shortcuts, we can define exactly which folders we want to see, whether they are Mail and Post Item folders, or Task Item folders, or folders of another type.
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8.2.
Defining Our Shortcuts View
(+7
Display Shortcuts
Pressing Ctrl+7 displays the Shortcuts view, as shown in the following screenshot. As you can see, it is empty now but we will start to add Shortcuts by clicking the “Add New Group” and the “Add New Shortcut” links.
Pressing Ctrl+7 displays the Shortcuts view
Repeatedly press the “Add New Shortcut” link and add the following folders: 1. Inbox 2. Archive 3. Tasks 4. Someday/Maybe 5. Waiting For 6. Projects 7. Sent Items 8. XTadaaa 9. Outbox 10. Notes
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Create Shortcuts to Folders
Repeatedly press the “Add New Group” link and create the following groups: 1. Mail 2. Actions 3. Miscellaneous The Shortcuts view now resembles something like this:
It’s time for some reorganization. Use the mouse to drag-anddrop each Shortcut to the right Group. It actually doesn’t matter which Shortcut ends up in which Group, as long as you are happy with the overview you create. You can even add other Groups, or remove Groups. It’s up to you, but this is what I did:
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As soon as you have added links to them, you can open and close the groups by clicking on their title (Mail, Actions, and Miscellaneous).
For clarity’s sake, you can delete the default Shortcuts group that contains the links to Outlook Today and Microsoft Office Online. Right-click the light blue Shortcuts group bar and select Remove Group from the popup menu.
Removing the default Shortcuts group
One last thing before we’re done: to use the standard Getting Things Done terminology, we’re going to rename the Tasks
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Create Shortcuts to Folders
shortcut to Next Actions. Please note that we rename just the Shortcut, not the actual folder itself. We do not create a new folder for Next Actions, but use the default Tasks folder, because this synchronizes better with a Smartphone. Also, Outlook 2003 will not trigger notifications for tasks in another folder than the default Tasks folder.
Right-click the Tasks item and choose Rename Shortcut from the popup menu. Type “Next Actions” and press the Enter button on your keyboard. This leaves us with the final Shortcuts view:
8.3.
Show Total Number of Items in Inbox
Outlook by default displays the number of unread items next to each shortcut. Because we want to process all our incoming e-mail and make sure that the inbox is empty once every day, we want to see the total number of items in the inbox, not just the number of unread items.
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Right-click the Inbox shortcut and choose Properties from the menu:
Select the option button before Show total number of items, and then press the OK button.
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Create Shortcuts to Folders
Select the option button before Show total number of items
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Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency
9. Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency Now we’ll only have to add a toolbar with two buttons before we can start with processing e-mails from our inbox. These two buttons will make it much easier to copy and move Outlook items (like e-mails); something we’ll often do during emptying our inbox. At the top of the Outlook screen, you’ll find the Standard toolbar. Apart from this Standard toolbar, you can find other toolbars in Outlook, like the Advanced toolbar, the Web toolbar, and maybe the Google toolbar or other custom or third-party toolbars.
The Standard button bar on top of the Outlook screen
Let’s first add a new toolbar ourselves: 1. Right-click the Standard toolbar and choose the option Customize… from the popup menu. 2. In the Customize dialog, press the New… button 3. In the New Toolbar dialog, specify EachDayEmpty as the name for your new toolbar:
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4. Press the OK button to close the New Toolbar dialog and create the toolbar. Do not close the Customize dialog yet. 5. If the toolbar is floating around, drag it to the top of the Outlook window with your mouse to dock it. Be sure to start dragging in the top left corner of the new toolbar, as you can see in this image:
As soon as you dock the toolbar next to the Standard toolbar, it will be empty, as you can see in this image:
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Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency
Now that we have our new toolbar, let’s add two buttons to it, a Copy Item button and a Move Item button: 1. Navigate to the Commands tab in the Customize dialog:
2. In the list box on the left side, select the Edit category 3. Then, in the list box on the right side, select the Copy to Folder… item
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4. Drag-and-drop this item to your newly created toolbar at the top of the screen:
5. Now, do the same with the Move to Folder… item that is just above the Copy to Folder… item in the list box at the right side of the Customize dialog:
Notice that the first button contains a text caption, while the second button only contains an image caption. We’re going to modify that now, so do not close the Customize dialog yet. 6. Right-click the new Move to Folder… button on the new toolbar that is represented by the image only (
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).
Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency
7. Select from the popup menu: Text Only (Always)
8. Both buttons now have a Text Only caption:
9. Right-click the Copy to Folder… button and edit the Name of the button, so that it is called “&1 Copy”. Mind the ampersand (&); this is important for accessing the button by keyboard.
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10. Right-click the Move to Folder… button and edit the Name of the button, so that it is called "&2 Move". Again, mind the ampersand (&).
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Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency
11. If all is well, you now have a new toolbar with two buttons on it:
12. Press the Close button on the Customize dialog. This will also remove the black rectangle around the currently selected button. If you don’t have an item (email, task, …) selected in Outlook, the buttons may gray out. Don’t worry, that’s okay.
That’s it. You have setup all necessary folders and created a brand new toolbar with two buttons. Finally, we can start processing our e-mails. If you are still in a setup-mood, you could turn to Chapter 11, and setup the [w] rule that will save you a lot of time when sending e-mails to delegate or order stuff!
Note: some people report that they lost their new buttons after restarting Outlook. This seems to be a bug in Outlook. However, there is a simple workaround: create the new buttons again, but put them in the Standard Toolbar of Outlook, not in a new toolbar as I describe in this chapter.
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Processing Your E-mail to Empty the Inbox
10. Processing Your E-mail to Empty the Inbox Now that we have done the basic setup of our folders, let’s see how we can process our e-mail as quickly as possible. A main difference with how people often process their e-mail is that in this system, you process your e-mails one at the time. The first time you read the e-mail, you make a decision on the next thing you’d like to do with it, whether it will be a concrete action or a reminder to yourself that you need to do more thinking. After making a decision about each e-mail, it is removed from your inbox. In most cases, it will be moved to the Archive, where you can access it for further processing. Meanwhile, a task is added to one of your lists to remind you of the work you decided you want to do. This whole process is explained in detail in this chapter. Each incoming e-mail asks for a decision. David Allen has described these kinds of decisions in his book, “Getting Things Done”. I will describe the questions step-by-step and add the necessary steps to process each e-mail correctly in Outlook.
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10.1. Is This Message SPAM? Can you just delete this message? If so, don’t hesitate: press the Delete button. This is by far the quickest way to remove emails from your inbox.
$
Delete is your friend
If you keep receiving unwanted e-mails from the same sender, you can add the sender to the Blocked Senders List. To do this, right-click the message and select from the popup menu: Junk E-mail | Add Sender to Blocked Senders List:
Right-click an e-mail and block further e-mails from the same sender from your inbox
Adding someone to your Blocked Senders List probably takes less time than unsubscribing from a mailing list. Besides: if you try to unsubscribe from SPAM, this will only let the sender know that you do read your email, thereby increasing the motivation to send you more SPAM (probably from a different address).
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10.2. Question: Is It Actionable During This Week? The next question is: Is it actionable during this week (the next 7 days)? There are only two possible answers to this question: “No” and “Yes”. Yes, I know, some situations are too ambiguous for a comfortable No or Yes. But even then, you have to make a decision. If you want to err on the safe side and choose Yes too often, that is perfectly fine. In that case, you will end with too many items on your Next Actions (Tasks) list, but you can always easily move items to the Someday/Maybe list later. I don’t know where the idea of limiting the amount of time to one week comes from. Personally, I’m sure I learned it from David Allen himself, but others accuse me from having made this up myself. However, I find that limiting this period to one week is healthy and makes things clear, so I’ll stick to it in this book.
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10.3. Answer 1/4: No, it is not actionable at all, and I want to delete this e-mail. If there is no action associated with a certain e-mail, the first alternative is that you want to delete the e-mail. This seems obvious, as this is what we do with letters, brochures and other paper-based communications. Apart from obvious SPAM, I don’t just delete e-mails if I don’t need them anymore. Let me explain. Storage costs are going down all the time. The amount of e-mail that you can store on a single hard drive is mind blowing. And I never know whether an e-mail that I don’t consider to be of any use right now, may turn into something that I’d like to be able to find and re-read later. The costs in time and money of archiving email are tiny compared to setting up and maintaining a proper paper-based archive. Instead of deleting an e-mail, I move it to the Archive folder. That means I can always find it later, if needed. I don’t worry about the costs of storing e-mails and I don’t have to worry about making a wrong decision when deleting an e-mail forever. This makes archiving an e-mail as painless as possible. Yes, I do have an archive with e-mail from the past 10 years – and sometimes that comes in rather handy. In Chapter 18: Setting Up Archives, we’ll talk a bit more about different ways of archiving e-mails.
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With the new buttons on our toolbar, we can quickly move an e-mail to the Archive.
%+2
Move an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+2 to activate our new Move button
2. With the Move Items dialog showing, press the “A” on your keyboard to select the first folder that starts with the letter A: Archive.
3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard, to activate the OK button, thereby move the e-mail message to the Archive and close the Move Items dialog. That’s it.
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From e-mail to Archive Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, * The amazing thing is that if you do this for a week or so, your fingers will pick up on the sequence and will start to automatically type Alt+2, A, Enter for any message that you want to move to the Archive. This may seem like a small thing, but the more you can automate the mechanics of processing e-mail (like letting your fingers do it automatically, instead of having to watch for the mouse cursor to drag-and-drop the e-mail), the faster you’ll become at processing e-mail. This technique can speed up emptying your inbox by a whopping 35%!
10.4. Answer 2/4: No, it is actionable, but not during this week. If there is an action associated with an e-mail, but you’re not going to do that action during this week, you should move it to the Someday/Maybe list. Each week during your Weekly Review, you’ll process the items on this list and decide again if they will be done during the week that follows your review. This approach makes sure that you can happily forget about the mail for one week, while not
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having to worry that it will fall off the table. It is stored safely in the Someday/Maybe list in Outlook. Adding the e-mail to the Someday/Maybe list is a two-step process. First, we’ll copy the e-mail to the Someday/Maybe list, and then we’ll move the e-mail to the Archive.
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+1 to activate our new Copy button
2. With the Copy Items dialog showing, press the “S” and the “O” on your keyboard to select the first folder that starts with the letters “So”: Someday/Maybe.
If you only press the letter ‘S’, you’d select the Sent Items folder. If you find that this takes too much typing, you could always rename the Someday/Maybe folder and make sure that the first letter of the folder name is unique.
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3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard to activate the OK button, thereby copying the e-mail message to the Someday/Maybe folder and close the Copy Items dialog. 4. Outlook will now display the new Task item in the Someday/Maybe folder. Close the item by pressing Alt+S (Save). We will do no editing of this item, as we are only going to review it once a week anyway. We can always edit it later if we want to.
%+2
Move an Item to another folder
5. Press Alt+2 to activate our new Move button
6. With the Move Items dialog showing, press the “A” on your keyboard to select the first folder that starts with the letter A: Archive.
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7. Press the Enter key on the keyboard, to activate the OK button, thereby moving the e-mail message to the Archive and close the Move Items dialog. If you condense this procedure to the keys you’ll have to press, it’s actually quite quick.
From e-mail to Someday/Maybe list 1. Copy the e-mail to the Someday/Maybe folder:
%+1 SO, * %+S 2. Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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10.5. Answer 3/4: No, it is not actionable, but I do want to archive it. As we have seen, I advocate a policy where you don’t just delete e-mail, but you move them to the Archive if you don’t need them anymore. That means for this question from the Getting Things Done schema, you’ll process e-mails exactly as I described in paragraph 10.3 above.
From e-mail to Archive Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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10.6. Answer 4/4: Yes, it is actionable and I want to do it during this week. If you answer “Yes” to the question “Is it actionable during this week?”, things get very interesting. This is something you cannot just delete, archive, or defer to think about later. You’ll have to make a few tough decisions right now. 1. What is my Expected Outcome? Peter Drucker teaches us to make up our mind about what we really want, before taking action on it. If you start with the end in mind, you’ll clear up a lot of ambiguity that surrounds knowledge work. Examples of Expected Outcomes: a. Computer is delivered b. Garage cleaned out c. Mortgage secured d. Project members updated on status e. Department reorganized 2. What is the Next Action? The Next Action should be the first, small and practical action that you would take to move into the direction of your Expected Outcome. Examples of Next Actions: a. Call John b. Pick up garbage c. Fill in forms d. Send e-mail e. Speak to Hannah
In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen thoroughly discusses these questions. In this book, we focus on the Outlook-side of things, but you will probably benefit from reading his explanations of these questions.
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Now that you have defined your Expected Outcome and know what the Next Action is, it’s time for some more categorizing.
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10.7. Alternative 1/4: The Next Action can be done within 2 minutes. The Two Minute Rule says that if you can complete a Next Action within two minutes, it is more efficient to do it right away, than to organize and defer the task. For instance: if you can send a reply to an e-mail within two minutes, you had better do it as soon as you have read that email. After finishing your Two Minutes Action, you will have to archive the e-mail, which we explained in paragraph 10.3 above.
From e-mail to Archive Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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10.8. Alternative 2/4: The Next Action is day or time specific. If the Next Action is day-specific, or time-specific, you’ll have to enter that action in your Calendar. You could do that by pressing Ctrl+Shift+A to create a new Appointment. You can also copy the e-mail to your Calendar, just as you can copy an e-mail to a Someday/Maybe folder, or other folder.
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+1 to activate our new Copy button
2. With the Copy Items dialog showing, press the “C” on your keyboard to select the Calendar folder.
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3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard, to activate the OK button, thereby copying the e-mail message to the Calendar and close the Copy Items dialog. 4. Outlook will now display a new Appointment item, with the text of the e-mail in the body of the new Appointment item.
5. If this is a date and time-specific appointment: press Alt+R to set the focus to the Start time edit box. Type the Start date and press the Tab-key to move to the time edit box. If this appointment is only day-specific: press Alt+V to check the All day event checkbox. 6. Press Alt+U to select the Subject edit box. Then modify the Subject of this Appointment, so that it makes sense to you when browsing through your calendar.
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If you have to make a call, it may be helpful to type the phone number in the Subject. This saves you from having to lookup the number when you’re about to make the call.
7. Press Alt+S to Save and Close the Appointment item. (This is a very useful keyboard shortcut from Outlook 2003 that still works in Outlook 2007, even though it is not advertised as being a shortcut anymore.) Now that we have added the appointment to our calendar, we still have to move the e-mail to our Archive, just as we did before in paragraph 10.3.
From e-mail to Calendar 1. Copy the e-mail to the Calendar:
%+1 C, * - Modify the properties of the new Appointment Item.
%+S 2. Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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10.9. Alternative 3/4: You can delegate the Next Action, or the Expected Outcome. Delegating the Next Action or the Expected Outcome can often be a Two Minute-item: forwarding an e-mail with some instructions, or calling someone. As soon as you have delegated something, you’ll want to put the item on your Waiting For list, so that your mind can stop bothering you about it. During your Weekly Review, you’ll review the Waiting For list to see if there is any follow-up action to take. The word “delegate” is used in a broad sense here; asking questions, placing orders, allocating work to another department etc. are all things that you are waiting for. The Next Action is not yours, it’s somebody else’s. Putting an incoming e-mail on your Waiting For list is just as easy as putting it on the Someday/Maybe list.
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+1 to activate our new Copy button
2. With the Copy Items dialog showing, press the “W” on your keyboard to select the Waiting For folder.
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3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard to activate the OK button, thereby copying the e-mail message to the Someday/Maybe folder and close the Copy Items dialog. 4. Outlook will now display the new Task item in the Waiting For folder. Close the item by pressing Alt+S (Save). We will do no editing of this item, as we are only going to review it once a week anyway. We can always edit it later if we want to. Now that we have added the appointment to our calendar, we still have to move the e-mail to our Archive, just as we did before in paragraph 10.3.
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From e-mail to Waiting For list 1. Copy the e-mail to the Waiting For folder:
%+1 W, * %+S 2. Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, * Putting e-mails that you sent yourself on your Waiting For list is even easier. I describe a neat technique involving a [w] in the body of your mail in Chapter 11: Fill Your Waiting For List With [w].
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10.10. Alternative 4/4: Put the Next Action on your Next Actions list (Tasks folder). Finally, we’re left with all e-mails that we do want to take action on this week, but it can’t be done in two minutes, it is not date/time specific, and worst of all: we cannot delegate it to someone else. We’ll have to put it on our own Next Actions lists (in the Tasks folder).
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+1 to activate our new Copy button
2. With the Copy Items dialog showing, press the “T” on your keyboard to select the Tasks folder.
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3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard, to activate the OK button, thereby copying the e-mail message to the Tasks folder and close the Copy Items dialog. 4. Outlook will now display the new Task item in the Tasks folder, with the text of the e-mail in the body of the new Task item.
5. Because this is a Next Action for yourself, we’ll modify the Subject of the task to contain: a. Your Expected Outcome (“Printer ok”), b. A slash (/) c. And the Next Action (“Walk over to Anne”) Together this looks like this: Printer ok / Walk over to Anne 6. Press Alt+U to select the Subject edit box, and then type the new Subject.
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If you press Alt+U the whole subject is selected. If you just start typing, Outlook will remove the selected text automatically. You do not have to press Backspace or Delete to do that. If, however, you do want to keep the text that is already in the subject, just press Alt+U to select the subject, and then press the right- or left-key to move the caret to the right or left side of the subject.
7. There is one more thing to consider for a Next Action: where do you need to be to do the action? Or what do you need to be able to do the action? This is what David calls the “context” for an action. Examples of contexts are: a. At home b. At the office c. At phone d. At computer e. Anywhere f. Errands g. …
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In Outlook, we can assign categories to a task to specify which context we need for this Next Action. Assigning categories is different in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.
Categories in Outlook 2003 OUTLOOK 2003
When you use Outlook 2003, the Task Item
has a button at the bottom right, named Categories. You can access this button by pressing Alt+G. If you adapt the Master Category List to contain all contexts that you regularly use, you can quickly and easily add a context to each new task.
Categories in Outlook 2007 OUTLOOK 2007
In Outlook 2007, the Categories subsystem
has been overhauled. Categories are color-coded, which is an advantage, but also much less keyboard-friendly, which is a major disadvantage if you want to work quickly and efficiently. To access the categories for a Task Item, you first press and release (!) the Alt key on your keyboard. Outlook will now display some possible keys to access items on the Ribbon:
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Press the H ( ) button on your keyboard, to select the Task tab and display the other keys for accessing items on the Task tab. Outlook will display the G ( ) near the categories button:
Press the G button on your keyboard, to display the available categories:
If you press the A button for All Categories…, you can change the names of the categories to reflect your contexts. You can even assign a shortcut key to each individual category.
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8. After selecting a category for your Next Action, close the item by pressing Alt+S (Save). Now that we have added the Next Action to our Next Actions (Tasks) list, we still have to move the e-mail to our Archive, just as we did before in paragraph 10.3.
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The whole procedure for placing an e-mail on our Next Actions list is then as follows:
From e-mail to Next Actions (Tasks) list 1. Copy the e-mail to the Tasks folder:
%+1 T, * - Modify the subject: Expected Outcome / Next Action - Choose a category (context) for the Next Action
%+S 2. Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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Fill Your Waiting For List With [w]
11. Fill Your Waiting For List With [w] Copying incoming e-mails to your Waiting For list has been made much easier with the buttons on our own toolbar. By far the easiest way to add items to your Waiting For list is by letting Outlook do it for you any time you send an e-mail that you want to put on the Waiting For list. If you delegate, order, or ask anything by e-mail, you can instruct Outlook to add that e-mail to a Waiting For list, by adding a simple [w] to the body of the e-mail. A [w] at the bottom of your e-mail is so inconspicuous, that most people will not even notice it (test it!). However, it can be a powerful tool to keep your Waiting For list up to date and your mind at rest. To enable this feature, we’ll have to create a new WaitingFor-E-mail folder and add a rule. Unfortunately Outlook cannot automatically copy sent e-mails to a Task Items folder, so we are going to create a second Waiting For list, this time as an E-mail and Post Items folder.
11.1. Create a New WaitingFor…e-mail Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
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1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “WaitingFor-E-mail” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Mail and Post Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy 5. Press the OK button
Creating the WaitingFor-E-mail folder, of type Mail and Post Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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Fill Your Waiting For List With [w]
11.2. Add a rule to copy outgoing e-mails with a [[w] in the body to the new WaitingFor-e-mail folder 1. From the main menu select Tools | Rules and Alerts…
(If your Outlook is setup to connect with an Exchangeserver, you may not be able to open this Rules and Alerts dialog, until you are connected to the Exchangeserver.) 2. Press the New Rule… button
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3. Select the option “Check messages after sending”
4. Press the Next button
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5. Select the item “with specific words in the body”
6. Click with your mouse on the blue underlined text at the bottom: “specific words” to display the Search Text dialog:
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7. Type [w] in the upper edit box:
8. Press the Add button:
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9. Press the OK button 10. Press the Next button 11. Select the item “move a copy to a specified folder”:
12. Click with your mouse on the blue underlined text at the bottom: “specified” to display the Rules and Alerts folder find dialog. Select the WaitingFor-E-mail folder, then press the OK button:
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13. Press the Finish button to return to the Rules and Alerts dialog 14. Press the OK button to return to the main Outlook window
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11.3. Test your new [w] rule Now test your new [w] rule to see if it works. 1. Press Ctrl+Shift+M to create a new e-mail 2. Compose and send a new e-mail to yourself. Don’t forget to add a [w] to the body of this e-mail.
3. After sending this e-mail, press Ctrl+Y and navigate to the WaitingFor-E-mail folder, then press the OK button:
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4. If everything has been set up correctly, you should see a copy of the message that you sent, with the [w] in it:
It took a few steps to setup, but now you can add a [w] to any e-mail you send and Outlook will automatically archive a copy for you in the WaitingFor-E-mail folder.
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Fill Your Waiting For List With [w]
The one thing you now have to do is review the WaitingFor-E-mail folder every week (or more often if your situation calls for that) and check if there is any follow up you need to do. Your subconscious mind can forget about these things, as they are safe in the folder.
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Working From Your Lists
12. Working From Your Lists 12.1. Overview of the runway You can now work from your lists, especially from the Calendar and the Next Actions list. These two provide you with an overview of the runway of your work: the appointments and actions for the coming days. The Calendar gives you an overview of the hard landscape for each day. If you follow the instructions that I have outlined above, you will only add day- and time-specific appointments, actions and information to your Calendar. If you view your Calendar, you know exactly which commitments have to be kept that day. The Next Actions list contains all actions that you decided you want to do during this week. As soon as you have time available, you can turn to the Next Actions list and see what you already decided to do.
12.2. A Unified View If you prefer to work with a unified view of both your
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Calendar and your Next Actions list, you can display the Task list next to the Calendar. OUTLOOK 2003
You can display the task list next to your Calendar
(Ctrl+2), by choosing View | Task list from the main menu. Right-click the title bar of the Task list to modify the Filter and Group-by options of the View. See Chapter 0 below for more information on using Views. OUTLOOK 2007
In any view in Outlook (Calendar, Inbox, etc.) you
can display the To-Do Bar (Alt+F2) to view your task list at the right side of the screen. This To-Do Bar can also show upcoming appointments. You can modify the appearance of the To-Do Bar via the main menu: View | To-Do Bar.
12.3. Accessing e-mails when needed As you’ve noticed, I suggest moving all incoming e-mails to the Archive, as soon as you’ve made a decision about what to do with the mail. When copying e-mails to your Next Actions list, the text of the e-mail is copied to the Task item, but you cannot use that directly to reply to the e-mail, nor are any attachments available in the Task item. My solution to that problem is to find the e-mail in the Archive, if I need it to complete a Next Action. Actually, that’s quite easy and fast if you use one of two sorting orders in your Archive. There are two sorting orders that I regularly use in the Archive folder: 1. By Date (View | Arrange By | Date – Alt+V, Enter, D) 2. By Sender (View | Arrange By | From – Alt+V, Enter, F)
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These two sorting orders enable me to quickly find almost any message that I need to see. In the By Sender sorting order, you can just type the first letters of the name of the sender, to move to the e-mails that were sent by that person. Combined with the option View | Arrange By | Show in Groups this gives me a very fast way of finding any e-mail that I need. For any e-mails that I cannot find this way, I use Outlook’s built-in search features, which I’ll cover in Chapter 16.
To make sure that your lists provides the best overview of your work and life, let’s introduce views and remove and resize some columns, group tasks by their context and do some more fun things. First, let’s talk about folders.
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Folders, Items and Views
13. Folders, Items and Views Before I can explain the concept of views and how you can make them work for you, I need to give you some fundamental information about folders and items. I’ll keep it short.
13.1. Outlook Folders are like Explorer Folders Folders in Outlook are like folders on your hard disk, which you can see in Windows Explorer. There are some subtle differences. Folders on your hard disk contain files; folders in Outlook contain items. Folders on your hard disk can contain other folders; so can folders in Outlook. Even though most people don’t realize this until they see the complete Folder List. Press Ctrl+6 to view the Folder List in Outlook and you’ll see the complete folder hierarchy. Outlook folders normally contain only items of just one type. Folders on your hard disk can contain many different types of files. One folder can contain Executables (.exe), Photos (.jpg) and Documents (.doc) all mixed together.
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At the time you create a new Outlook folder, you specify which type of items you want to store in that folder. As soon as you copy an item from one folder to another, Outlook converts the item to the type of the destination folder. That is why you can copy an e-mail to a task items folder and see it turned into a new Task Item. There are some exceptions to this rule that are only of interest to super users and administrators.
13.2. Display the Folder List
(+6
Display the Folder List
The Folder List displays the complete folder hierarchy in Outlook, including all folders of any type that are available right now. You can also display all folders of a specific type:
(+1
Display all E-mail folders
(+2
Display all Calendar folders
(+3
Display all Contacts folders
(+4
Display all Task folders
(+5
Display all Notes folders
(+6
Display the Folder List with all folders
(+7
Display Shortcuts (see chapter 8)
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13.3. Display a specific Folder Working with Outlook, you’ll often want to open a specific folder, like the Tasks folder, the Projects folder, or the WaitingFor folder. The shortcut keys above don’t provide much convenience in that case, because they display all folders of a specific type, not the specific folder that you want to access at that moment. Fortunately, Outlook provides a shortcut key to go to a specific folder:
(+Y
Go to a specific folder
13.4. A Folder is just a list with items It’s important to remember that a folder is just a list with items, even if it doesn’t look like one. Take for instance the Calendar – it displays as a proper calendar with appointments, events and a time scale. Behind the scenes it is a list like any other, which you can see when you display the All Appointments view of the Calendar. From the main menu select: 1. View 2.
OUTLOOK 2003
Arrange By…
3. Current View 4. All Appointments This will show you a list with all appointments, instead of the regular calendar view.
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The Calendar is a list like any other folder
To revert to the default view, select from the main menu: 1. View 2.
OUTLOOK 2003
Arrange By…
3. Current View 4. Day/Week/Month
13.5. The View determines which items you see and how they are displayed Each folder is, behind the screens, just a list of items. The Current View determines how you actually see these items. A View can sort, filter, group or otherwise manipulate the items on the screen. Even if you do not see all items in the folder because of the filter, they are still in the folder. EXAMPLE
— In the task list, one View could show all tasks that
are not yet completed, while another View shows all completed tasks. The folder itself however, contains all items: both completed and not completed tasks.
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Setup Views For a Folder
14. Setup Views For a Folder Outlook has great features for customizing the way you see the data in a folder. Let’s see how that works for our Next Actions list.
14.1. Create a new View Let’s create a new View before we start modifying the View. In this way, we can always revert to the default View if we make a mistake. 1. Go to the Tasks list (Ctrl+Y, T, Enter) 2. From the main menu, choose: a. View b.
OUTLOOK 2003
Arrange By…
c. Current View d. Define Views… This will open the Custom View Organizer:
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3. Press the Copy… button to create a copy of the Current view settings. 4. Specify a name for the new view. I suggest that you start the name with an underscore (_), so that you can easily recognize it later.
5. The Customize View dialog will now open to enable you to change the settings for this new view:
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Setup Views For a Folder
6. Press the Other Settings… button to make some basic changes to Other Settings:
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You could, for instance, press the Row Font… button to change the font that is used to display the lines in the grid. I find that simply setting this to a font and a font size that suits you, can tremendously improve your happiness in working with Outlook. 7. Press the OK button to close the Other Settings dialog 8. Press the OK button to close the Customize View dialog 9. Press the Apply View button to close the Custom View dialog and start using our new _Next Actions View You should now see the lines in your Tasks folder displayed in the font that you selected. You can always open the Customize View dialog later to make further changes to your View.
14.2. Select a specific view Let me show you three different ways to select a specific View for a folder: 1. Via the main menu 2. Via the Advanced Toolbar 3. By adding a button to our own toolbar 1. You can select a specific view via the main menu. 10. Go to the Tasks list (Ctrl+Y, T, Enter) 11. From the main menu, choose: e. View f.
OUTLOOK 2003
Arrange By…
g. Current View
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Setup Views For a Folder
This will display a list of Views for the current folder, from which you can select the View that you want:
2. You can select a specific view via the Advanced Toolbar. 1. Right-click on one of the toolbars or the main menu at the top of the screen 2. Select the Advanced toolbar, so that it will be checked:
3. The Advanced toolbar contains a dropdown box that shows all available views. If you click the triangle, the
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dropdown box will be shown for you to select your desired view:
3. You can add a button to our own Custom Toolbar. 1. Right-click the EachDayEmpty toolbar and select Customize… from the popup menu 2. Navigate to the Commands tab 3. In the Categories list box on the left, select View 4. Then, in the Commands list box on the right, select Current View
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Setup Views For a Folder
5. Drag-and-drop the Current View item to the EachDayEmpty toolbar
6. Right-click the new Current View button on the toolbar and edit the Name of the button, so that it is called “&0 View”. Notice that the “0” is a zero and mind the ampersand (&); this is important for accessing the button by keyboard.
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7. Press the Close button on the Customize dialog. From now on, you can press Alt+0 (zero) to open a dropdown box with all available views, while the button itself takes up much less screen real estate than the one on the Advanced toolbar. Unfortunately, after displaying the dropdown list, you cannot press the first letter of your desired view to activate it. You’ll have to select it with the up and down arrows on your keyboard. My suggestion is to press the up arrow four or five times, until you reach the view that you want.
14.3. Remove columns Removing columns from a view is as easy as dragging the column title away from the title bar of the grid. The other way to remove a column is to right-click the title of the column and select Remove This Column from the popup menu. The default view for the Tasks folder looks like this:
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Setup Views For a Folder
Personally, I don’t like the Due Date field in that view. I’d much rather put anything that is date-specific (like a due date) in my Calendar. So let’s remove the Due Date column from the view by rightclicking the Due Date column title and selecting Remove This Column.
Any columns in a view that you do not use should be removed from the field. This avoids clutter and helps you in focusing on what you are trying to accomplish. And remember: the data in the column itself is not gone, it’s still in
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the folder. It is just the view that doesn’t show this column anymore.
14.4. Add column Adding a column is easy, too. You just right-click the grid’s title bar, select Field Chooser from the popup menu and drag-anddrop the column that you want to add to the title bar. Let’s add the Categories field to our view: 1. Right-click the title bar 2. Select Field Chooser from the popup menu
3. Select the category for the column that you want to add from the top drop-down box, so that it will be displayed in the list. 4. Drag-and-drop the Categories field to the title bar of the grid, until it snaps into place:
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Setup Views For a Folder
5. Close the Field Chooser by clicking the X ( ).
14.5. Add a Custom Field If you want, you can define your own custom fields and use them in your view, in addition to the ones that are already predefined in Outlook. You may, for instance, want to create a Project field for each task, to track the Project that the task is part of. Personally, I don’t do this. It takes too much administration time to keep all this information synced. It isn’t necessary for me to track this information, especially not as I list the Expected Outcome (which is the project’s name) in front of each Next Action, as I described above. See Chapter 20 for more discussion of tracking projects and actions.
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OPTIONAL
— Add a Custom Project Field to the view:
1. Right-click the title bar of the grid 2. Select Field Chooser from the popup menu 3. Press the New… button at the bottom of the Field Chooser 4. Specify the Name of the new field and the type of information that you want to store in it:
5. Press the OK button 6. The new field will now be displayed in a special category in the Field Chooser: User-defined fields in folder:
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Setup Views For a Folder
7. Drag-and-drop the new Project field to the title bar of the grid, as shown above with the Categories field (paragraph 14.4) The new Custom Project Field is now shown as a new column in the view:
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14.6. Sorting data Sorting data is as easy as clicking on the title of a column. Clicking again on the same column title will sort the column upside-down. A small triangle indicates the sort order.
14.7. Column width With the mouse, you can drag the edges of a column title to make the column wider or smaller.
14.8. Group by a field Grouping by a field is a powerful way to organize a long list of items into more discrete groups. Let’s group the Next Actions list by the Categories field, so that we have all actions grouped by context. In the meantime, I have specified the categories for the Next Actions in this list, as described in paragraph 10.10.
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Setup Views For a Folder
Group by the categories column: 1. Right-click the Categories column title 2. Select Group By This Field from the popup menu
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This will show the Next Actions grouped by context:
You can expand and collapse each group individually with the left and right arrow key on your keyboard. When you use the up and down arrow keys to navigate through the list, you’ll find that it sometimes skips over the rows with the names of the groups. This is inconvenient, as it makes it more difficult to expand/collapse groups by keyboard. Fortunately, you can press Alt+Up or Alt+Down to avoid skipping over the group names.
Use the main menu to expand or collapse all groups at the same time: View | Expand/Collapse Groups | Collapse All Groups, and View | Expand/Collapse Groups | Expand All Groups
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Setup Views For a Folder
To save screen real estate, you may want to right-click the title bar of the grid again, and select Group By Box. This will remove the Group By box, which you won’t need during normal operations anyway:
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14.9. Add a filter to the view You can add a filter to a view to display only a subset of the items in the folder. Let’s add a filter to this view, so that we will not see any completed items in our Next Actions list. If you want to use the XTadaaa list, you just move each completed item to the XTadaaa list (via our new toolbar: Alt+2, X, Enter) after marking it complete. In that case, you don’t want to filter your Next Actions list to only show completed actions, because that would make it cumbersome to find and move the completed items to your XTadaaa list again.
Add a filter to this view to show only non-completed items: 1. Right-click the title bar of the grid 2. Select Customize Current View… 3. Press the Filter… button
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Setup Views For a Folder
4. Navigate to the Advanced tab in the Filter dialog:
5. Press the Field button 6. Select Frequently-used fields from the popup menu 7. Select Complete from the sub menu
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8. Make sure that the specified condition is “equals”, and the specified value is “No”. Then press the Add to List button to add this filter condition to the list of conditions.
9. Press the OK button to close the Filter dialog 10. Press the OK button to close the Customize View dialog
Now as soon as you check the box at the beginning of a task, it will disappear from your view. It will still be available as an item in the folder though, which you can see by selecting a different view, like the built-in Completed Tasks view (via our own toolbar: Alt+0, Completed Tasks).
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Setup Views For a Folder
14.10. The Customize View dialog Use the Customize View Dialog to adapt any setting of your view. You can use this dialog to select Fields, to Group By certain fields, to Sort and Filter your view. This is also the place to change the fonts for your grid. You can open the Customize View Dialog by right-clicking the title bar of the grid and selecting Customize Current View…, or you can use the main menu: View | (Arrange By) | Current View | Customize Current View…
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14.11. Useful View Settings Let’s review some useful settings for the views of the different folders.
Next Actions List We set up our own view for the Next Actions List (Tasks Folder) already. I suggest you use a font that you like, group the items by the Categories field and make sure that any field that you’re not actively using is removed from the view. I suggest that you filter the view so that any completed items are not displayed, or that you move all completed items to the XTadaaa list yourself.
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Setup Views For a Folder
To-Do Bar The To-Do Bar (Alt+F2) is not a folder per se, but you can modify it by right-clicking the title bar and selecting Custom… anyway. This menu item will display the Customize View Dialog (see paragraph 0). I suggest that you apply the same characteristics as for the Next Actions List, as described above.
Waiting For List The Waiting For List is reviewed only once a week (or more often if you need to), so I suggest you do not edit the subjects in this list as thoroughly as you should do for the Next Actions folder. This also means that you’d benefit from turning on the Reading Pane in this view. That gives you more information
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about the Waiting For item, especially if you copied it to the Waiting For list from an e-mail. To turn on the Reading Pane, select from the main menu: View | Reading Pane | Right
WaitingFor-E-mail List The WaitingFor-E-mail List is only reviewed once a week too, so I suggest you apply the same settings as described above for the Waiting For List.
Someday/Maybe List The WaitingFor-E-mail List is only reviewed once a week too, so I suggest you apply the same settings as described above for the Waiting For List.
Projects List The Projects List could be a simple list with just the names of your current projects. I suggest you remove all superfluous fields from the view, like the Due Date field and the Mark Complete checkbox field. I also suggest you select a font that you like.
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Weekly Review
15. Weekly Review You need a Weekly Review to keep an overview over your work and life and to make sure that your mind still trusts the system after a week of work. During the Weekly Review, you’ll review all items in the following folders: -
Calendar
-
Next Actions
-
Waiting For
-
Someday/Maybe
-
Projects
You basically check if these lists are still up-to-date, or if some items need to be added, removed or moved from one list to another. With the buttons on our own toolbar, it can be done quickly. The beauty of this whole system lies in the fact that you check your Calendar and Next Actions list on a daily basis. The Waiting For, Someday/Maybe and Projects list are only used to add new items. You have to review these lists only once a week during the Weekly Review. The fact that you can ignore all this information without any negative side effects greatly increases your focus throughout the week. Depending on your job, you may need to review your Waiting For list more often. Secretaries and Office Managers may even need to review their Waiting For list multiple times each day.
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Search
16. Search What is the use of storing all this information, if you cannot find it when you need it? Fortunately, your computer is probably much faster than you are at searching and finding information. Another advantage is that you can make a cup of coffee, while you put your computer to work to find the e-mail or document needed.
16.1. Quick Search in one folder
(+E
Search in the current folder
Press Ctrl+E to display or highlight the search row just above the grid, then enter the search phrase and press Enter. You can also press the Esc-key to cancel searching.
OUTLOOK 2003
In Outlook 2003, this will search through all items
in the folder, even the ones that are not shown due to a filter. I actually found that quite useful, but this behaviour is changed in Outlook 2007.
16.2. Search address books The Standard toolbar sports a Search address books feature that is really quick in finding contacts. The only problem that I
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see is that I cannot access it via a shortcut-key. You do need your mouse to use it.
16.3. Advanced Find
(+'+F
Advanced Find
Press Ctrl+Shift+F to display the Advanced Find dialog. This dialog allows you to execute much more complex searches, for instance through multiple folders or with more specific properties, like specific senders of e-mails or the status of tasks.
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Search
16.4. Search software Windows Vista and Office 2007 are integrated with Microsoft’s Windows Desktop Search feature. Windows Desktop Search cannot just search in Outlook, but can find e-mails and documents anywhere on your own computer. Via the main menu, Tools | Instant Search | Search Options… you can access the Search Options dialog which gives you the ability to select which data files should be indexed by Windows Desktop Search.
When working with Outlook 2003, I had very good experiences with Google Desktop, which you can download free from http://desktop.google.com
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Optimizing Outlook For Speed
17. Optimizing Outlook For Speed To efficiently work with Outlook, you’ll want to make some basic setup changes. By making a few small changes, you’ll be working more efficiently immediately.
17.1. Switch off new mail notifications Most knowledge workers suffer from a lack of concentration due to the unending distractions and interruptions during the day. A UC Irvine field study shows that you can expect to do only three minutes of work before being interrupted again by an incoming e-mail, instant message, phone call or co-worker. With Outlook, you can at least switch off the new mail notification. 1. From the main menu, choose: Tools | Options 2. Press the button E-mail Options… 3. In the E-mail Options dialog Press the button Advanced E-mail Options 4. In the Advanced E-mail Options dialog uncheck all items below “When new items arrive in my Inbox”: a. Uncheck Play a sound b. Uncheck Briefly change the mouse cursor c. Uncheck Show an envelope icon in the notification area d. And especially, uncheck Display a New Mail Desktop Alert
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5. Press the OK button three times to return to the main Outlook interface
Switching off e-mail notifications for more concentration and focus
17.2. Switch off MSN Integration to speed up Outlook To speed up Outlook, it is useful to disable the integration with the MSN or Live Messenger. 1. From the main menu, choose: Tools | Options 2. Navigate to the Other tab 3. Uncheck Display online status next to a person name 4. Press the OK button to return to the main Outlook interface www.eachdayempty.com
Optimizing Outlook For Speed
Switching off integration with MSN / Live Messenger
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Setting Up Archives
18. Setting Up Archives Let me explain two different ways of archiving e-mails and why I made my choices the way I did.
18.1. Alternative 1: One folder per subject, project, customer, employee, etc. Many people create a subfolder in their inbox for each subject, project, customer, employee or another description that makes sense to them. They archive any email that pertains to this description in the appropriate folder. The advantage of this method is that you can find any email that concerns that description in the same folder, even if the e-mail itself does not contain the name of the subject, project, customer or employee. Unfortunately, there are quite a few disadvantages to this approach. Let me name a few of them: 1. Archiving any e-mail asks for a decision. And as you know, making decisions takes time and energy and can very easily lead to procrastination, which results in a full and cluttered inbox. This is an undesired effect if you want overview and less stress.
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2. Some e-mails pertain to two or more subjects. In which folder or folders do you archive such e-mails? 3. You could accidentally misplace an e-mail in the wrong archive folder. This probably means that you’ll never find it again, apart from letting Outlook search through all archive folders. 4. The hierarchy of archive folders grows throughout the years, thereby becoming more and more unwieldy. Any overview that used to be there in the beginning is lost over the months and years. 5. To make the archive comprehensive, any sent e-mail should be added from the Sent Items folder to the archive folder too. This takes extra work. You can see that I’m not too optimistic about the efficiency of this way of archiving e-mail. Still, I’d like to point out one valid reason for creating an archive folder per subject: when you need to keep all mails that pertain to a certain subject together with an almost legal accuracy is when you’ll have to do this. So for a few projects I create subfolders to store all e-mail that pertains to those projects. For all other e-mail, I suggest you experiment with the use of just one folder as an archive. After four years, I can say that this works fine for me (and is much faster!).
18.2. Alternative 2: One folder for all archived mail I use one Archive folder that contains all archived e-mails from the past few months. This way I avoid having to make a decision about each e-mail that I want to archive. The procedure is easy: press Alt+2 (on our own toolbar), A, Enter. That’s the same procedure for each e-mail.
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Setting Up Archives
In paragraph 12.3, I have described how to quickly find e-mails in your Archive again.
Long-term archive For practical purposes, I move the e-mails from my Archive folder to another Long-term archive folder when they have become too old, or more accurately: when my Archive folder has become too big to be fast enough when searching through it. At the time of writing, my Archive contains 5,727 emails, which translates to roughly 3 months of incoming emails for me. On my current computer with my current setup, I still find sorting and searching through this amount of e-mails fast enough. As soon as I start questioning the performance of Outlook, I’ll move the oldest mails to my Long-term archive. In my case, this Long-term archive is located on my Exchange server, but you could very well create another .PST file, create a Long-term archive in that new .PST file and then move your messages to that .PST file. When you right-click the Archive folder in the Shortcuts view (Ctrl+7) and select Properties from the menu, you can navigate to the Auto Archive tab to have Outlook do this cleaning-up to a .PST file automatically for you.
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Note: if you use PST files make sure that you backup them frequently and reliably. Also it is best to not let them grow too big. I’d say that when your PST files reaches the 1 Gigabyte, you’d better start to split your data between two PST files.
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Stop Using Your Mouse
19. Stop Using Your Mouse When it comes to productivity, using your keyboard is the way to go. Outlook supports a tremendous amount of shortcuts that you don’t need to learn by heart immediately. If you remember to use Alt+1 and Alt+2 (for the Copy and Move buttons on our own toolbar), you will be able to empty your inbox much faster than the average individual who dragsand-drops e-mails to task lists with the mouse. You may notice that I describe dragging and dropping in some places, but these are situations where you set up something only once. As soon as it comes to day-to-day work, the keyboard is much faster.
Using the keyboard instead of the mouse can increase your productivity 40% for computer-intensive tasks like emptying your inbox.
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Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them
20. Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them The flexibility of Outlook brings with it a whole lot of ideas on how to connect projects with actions, all of them incompatible with each other.
20.1. Expected Outcome / Next Action In this book, I have focused on a fairly basic but productive way of working, for which you don’t need to install extra software or program VBA macros. This is the exact same approach that I have used myself for over two years now. In my Next Actions list, I specify my tasks this way: Expected Outcome, Slash (/), and Next Action. My current projects line up with my Expected Outcomes. That’s it. No more administration to take care of.
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20.2. A Project field for each Next Action If you want to take this to the next level, you could add a Project column to your Next Actions list. I already described how to do this in paragraph 14.5. If you also add a Project column to your Someday/Maybe list, you can easily move items between Next Actions and Someday/Maybe, while still being able to see the Project it belongs to.
20.3. Defining Projects in a Contacts folder and linking items Outlook can link items of any type to a Contact item. We can take advantage of this functionality by masquerading a Project as a Contact. 1. Create a New Projects Folder, but specify Contact Items as the type for the new folder. 2. Create a Shortcut to your new Projects Folder in the Shortcuts Pane (Ctrl+7). 3. Add a few projects to your new Projects Folder. Use the Full Name for specifying the name of the project and leave the other fields empty. 4.
OUTLOOK 2007
Switch on Contact Linking on all Forms. Via
the main menu select Tools | Options to open the Options dialog. Press the Contact Options… button on the Preferences tab to display the Contact Options dialog. Check the Show Contact Linking on all Forms item and
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Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them set the Default File As order to First Last, otherwise Outlook will mangle your project names.
Press the OK button to close the Contact Options dialog. Press the OK button to close the Options dialog. 5. Open an item, like a task item in the Next Actions (Tasks) folder by selecting it and pressing the Enter key on your keyboard. 6. Press the Contacts… button in the lower left corner of the window to display the Select Contacts dialog. 7. Type the “P“ on your keyboard to select the Projects folder, then use the Tab key on your keyboard to move to the bottom half of the dialog and start typing the name of your project to select it.
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8. Press the Enter key on your keyboard to activate the OK button. The project will now be listed at the bottom of the Task Item window:
9. Press Alt+S to save and close the Task item or press Ctrl+S to save but not close the Task item.
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Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them 10. After saving the task item, you can double-click the underlined project name (“Computer Delivered”) to open the Project Item. 11. Click the Activities button (or press ALT, H, AZ) to display a list of all items that are linked to this project. 12. If you want to setup your project list this way, you could also add the Contacts field to your view in the Next Actions List. This would automatically show you which Project the Next Action is linked to. WARNING
— It seems that Outlook doesn’t update the
Activities list in the Project as often as I’d expect it to. That means sometimes I do not see tasks in the list even while these tasks were indeed linked to that Project! You can create a custom form for this folder and modify the fields in the view to make all of this less like you’re dealing with a real contact and more with a project. Any intermediate book on Outlook will tell you how to create a custom form, while chapter 14 in this book explains how to create a view that suits your needs.
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Working With a Smartphone
21. Working With a Smartphone Smartphone 21.1. Take multiple folders with you Most Smartphones cannot synchronize multiple Outlook task lists. You’re stuck with the default Tasks folder, which is in itself a good reason to choose that folder to store your Next Actions. If you do want to sync multiple task folders, you may want to look at the KeySuite software from Chapura (www.chapura.com). Unfortunately, it is available for the Palm operating system only. I use KeySuite on my Palm Centro. Chapura also has a solution for Windows Mobile based Smartphones, called PocketMirror for Windows Mobile. This software collapses multiple Outlook Task lists into the default Task list when synchronizing with your Smartphone. The different task lists are then represented with categories on your phone.
21.2. Create an Ideas (Stuff) task folder This may be a good idea for anyone using Outlook, but it makes a lot of sense if you use a Smartphone to capture ideas. Create separate Ideas folder of type Task Items in Outlook. Use that folder to store any new idea, appointment, promise or other stuff that you want to capture in your trusted system. As
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I wrote before, it is much easier to add items to a Task Items folder than it is to add items to your own e-mail inbox. Because you use this Ideas folder as an extra inbox, you will have to empty it regularly and process the items in it – exactly like you process the e-mails in your inbox. The same shortcut keys and sequences apply here. This makes it tremendously easy to capture stuff, without having to make a decision at the same time. My default Task folder on my Treo is this Ideas folder. That way I can press one button on my Treo and start adding stuff to it. As soon as I sync my Treo with my Outlook, they are available for further processing in the Ideas folder. Most of the time this is much easier for me than writing stuff down and having to re-type it again later. In Outlook itself, the Ideas folder is great if you use it in combination with Fingertips (www.getfingertips.com) to quickly add ideas to the folder.
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Deadlines and Your Calendar
22. Deadlines and Your Calendar I’m often asked how I track deadlines, so let me explain. In my view, a deadline is a date-specific item, which has to end up on my Calendar. So I’ll put my deadlines on the Calendar (Ctrl+Shift+A) as an All day event (Alt+V). Many times, I’d like to be reminded of that deadline a few days in advance. If the deadline requires much work that I have to do to meet that deadline, I may want to be reminded a few weeks ahead of time. So, I put another All day event on my Calendar a few days or weeks before the deadline to remind me that I’m approaching a deadline. As soon as I see that reminder on my Calendar, I’ll add an item to my Next Actions list (Ctrl+Shift+K) to start doing the work for that deadline. My Next Actions list does not contain a Due Date column. I feel that putting a Due Date in the Next Actions list does not motivate me and makes the view more cluttered than necessary, but if it works for you, feel free to leave it in the view, or to add it again.
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Using the Tadaaa List
23. Using the Tadaaa List The advantage of using a Tadaaa list is that you can see which actions you have completed during the last day, or week. If you are a knowledge worker, you could be very productive, without your realizing it, because of the daily stress and urgency. How do you use the Tadaaa list? 1. As soon as you finish an action in your task list, mark it as complete. This is necessary to set the correct value for the Date Completed field of your task item. 2. Now move the item to your XTadaaa list. If you have really named it XTadaaa and created our custom toolbar that is easy: Alt+2, X, Enter. 3. Make sure that the view of your XTadaaa list contains the Date Completed field. You can find instructions on how to do that in paragraph 14.4. 4. Group your list by the Date Completed field. Instructions on how to do that are in paragraph 14.8. You’ll now have a list with all actions that you completed, grouped by the date on which you completed them.
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After a while, you could delete the oldest items from the list by hand, or you could set the Auto Archive function to do that automatically.
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/ Sheet workflow diagram
147
This scheme schem is based on the book Getting Things Done, authored by David Allen (www.davidco.com authored (www.davidco.com). ).
24. S
heet workflow diagram
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Shortcut Keys
25. Shortcut Shortcut Keys 25.1. New items
(+'+M
New e-mail
(+'+K
New task
(+'+A
New appointment
(+'+C
New contact
(+'+N
New note
25.2. Display folders
(+1
Display e-mail
(+2
Display calendar
(+3
Display contacts
(+4
Display tasks
(+5
Display notes
(+6
Display folder list
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25.3. Move around quickly
(+7
Display shortcuts
(+Y
Go to a specific folder
25.4. Use our new EachDayEmpty toolbar
%+0
Change to another view
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
%+2
Move an Item to another folder
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Books and Other Resources
26. Books and Other Resources 26.1. Books Getting Things Done The Art of Stress-Free Productivity David Allen ISBN13: 9780142000281 Implementing David Allen’s Workflow Processing using Microsoft Outlook A paper from the David Allen Company, that is available in their online shop at http://www.davidco.com Take Back Your Life! Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to get organized and stay organized Sally McGhee and John Wittry ISBN13: 9780735623439 Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook: The Eight Best Practices of Task and E-Mail Management Michael Linenberger ISBN13: 9780974930411 Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Step by Step Joan Preppernau and Joyce Cox ISBN13: 9780735623002
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Microsoft Outlook 2007 Bible Peter G. Aitken ISBN13: 9780470046456
26.2. Outlook add-ins There are many add-ins available for Outlook. For this book, I decided to describe a way of implementing Getting Things Done in Outlook without the use of any add-in. This has the advantage that you don’t need extra privileges from your system administrator to install anything. In many large corporations, that is just not feasible. Also, the approach that I describe in this book works in any language version of Outlook, as long as you are able to translate the menu items and instructions yourself. Most of the shortcut keys however will work in all language versions of Outlook. However, if you work with the English language version of Outlook and would like some extra help from an add-in, there is one of them that I recommend you check out.
NetCentrics Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In® NetCentrics has developed an Outlook add-in to facilitate the use of Getting Things Done in Outlook. Right now they have released a version that supports both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 on Windows 2000, XP or Vista. This add-in is competitively priced, but it is only compatible with English installations of Outlook. http://gtdsupport.netcentrics.com/buy/
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Books and Other Resources
26.3. Fingertips Fingertips is not an add-in, add in, but a small utility that is designed to quickly add information information to Outlook without having to open Outlook itself. That is great for adding items to your Waiting For or Next Actions list. It can also display specific Outlook folders, start up applications and open often used documents.
At the time of writing, you can download a free version from http://www.getfingertips.com
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I hope that you enjoyed this book. moreeffect offers excellent discounts on this book when ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales. For more information please contact: [email protected] phone +31-343-421381 Feel free to take advantage of our other services, or visit my weblog with more Outlook tips at www.eachdayempty.com
Version 1.2
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How to quickly and efficiently process your e-mail in Microsoft Outlook
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/Introduction
Taco Oosterkamp
Each Day Empty
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www.eachdayempty.com eachdayempty.com © Copyright 2005 - 2009 by moreeffect, www.moreeffect.eu All rights reserved. No part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher. No patent liability is assumed with respect to the use of the information contained herein. Although every precaution precaution has been taken in the preparation of this book, the publisher and author assume no responsibility for errors or omissions. Nor is any liability assumed for damages resulting from the use of the information contained herein. International Standard Book Number: 978-90-79421 978 79421-05-3 January 2009 Microsoft, Outlook and Windows are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Other product and company names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners. Each Day Empty is a trademark of moreeffect. Warning and Disclaimer Every effort has been made to make this book as complete and as accurate as possible, but no warranty or fitness is implied. The information provided is on an "as is" basis. The authors and the publisher shall have neither liability nor responsibility to any person or entity with respect to any loss or damages arising from the information contained in this book. Bulk Sales moreeffect offers excellent discounts on the printed edition of this book when ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales. For more information please contact [email protected] phone +31-343 343-421381 Each Day Empty was previously sold as 'The Happy Outlook Book'.
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/Introduction
1. Introduction Introduction During g the last ten years, I have organized my work, life and email with Microsoft Outlook. Right now, I wouldn’t know of another program that would allow me to do it just as easily. Yes, I’m a happy Outlook user. But during uring my work (I train professionals in working smarter), I encounter many people who are burdened by full e-mail inboxes, incomplete and sloppy task lists and a general sense of failure when it comes to managing all the information in their work and lives. live I also see many people using Outlook very inefficiently. This in itself is a problem, because working with a tool that is not efficient adds a lot of stress, not to mention tardiness to the whole process of managing e-mail.. This book ook strives to tell you you how to setup Outlook for maximum efficiency, but also teaches you how to integrate the Getting Things Done methodology in Outlook. The book “Getting Things Done” by David Allen has had a major impact on my own work. Much of what you’ll read in this Book Bo is inspired by his philosophy of working smarter. I’m much obliged to David Allen (http://www.davidco.com http://www.davidco.com), but because of http://www.davidco.com), readability, I will not refer to him constantly. I hope that this book b will give you a boost in processing and organizing your life. And if you’re looking for more, you can always check my weblog with tips at www.eachdayempty.com Taco J. Oosterkamp Each Day Empty
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Table of Contents
2. Table of Contents 1.
Introduction ............................................................ 5
2.
Table of Contents ................................................... 7
3.
What Are We Going To Do? .................................. 9
4.
Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind? ..................................................................... 11
5.
Navigation Pane ................................................... 17
6.
How To Quickly Process E-mail .......................... 19
7.
Setup Folders ........................................................ 23
8.
Create Shortcuts to Folders ................................ 33
9.
Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency ............................................................................... 41
10.
Processing Your E-mail to Empty the Inbox ..... 49
11.
Fill Your Waiting For List With [w] ..................... 75
12.
Working From Your Lists ..................................... 87
13.
Folders, Items and Views .................................... 91
14.
Setup Views For a Folder .................................... 95
15.
Weekly Review .................................................... 119
16.
Search .................................................................. 121
17.
Optimizing Outlook For Speed ......................... 125
18.
Setting Up Archives ........................................... 129
19.
Stop Using Your Mouse ..................................... 133
20.
Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them ......................... 135
21.
Working With a Smartphone ............................ 141
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22.
Deadlines and Your Calendar ........................... 143
23.
Using the Tadaaa List ........................................ 145
24.
Sheet workflow diagram ................................... 147
25.
Shortcut Keys ..................................................... 149
26.
Books and Other Resources ............................. 151
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What Are We Going To Do?
3. What Are We Going To Do? This book contains a bit of theory, but mostly step-by-step instructions on how to setup and use Outlook most efficiently. It focuses on processing e-mail and is based on the Getting Things Done principles.
1
After a warning about the Navigation Pane, we’ll
2
We’ll quickly move to set up some extra folders that
cover a little bit of theory on emptying your e-mail inbox.
we need in Outlook. Don’t worry: I’ve explained all the steps you need to take in detail, with screenshots to
guide you through it all.
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As soon as we can, we’ll learn how to actually empty the inbox. I’ll explain the decisions you’ll have to make and the actual keys to efficiently process any e-mail that
comes your way.
4
And finally, we’ll talk about working from your lists and a whole lot of other smart things to do when working with Outlook.
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Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind?
4. Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind? Last year I was interviewed by business magazine Managementteam about workload and keeping your mind clear. Keeping a clear mind: it may seem impossible but in practice it is a real boost for your effectiveness and creativity.
4.1.
A clear mind reduces stress
Today's work is totally different than work in the past. Working on an assembly line is different from working with your brains. Assembly line workers don't have much influence on their work and they literally see their work passing by on the assembly line. Workers in the knowledge sector, on the other hand, are dealing with mental processes. Assembly line workers don't take their work home but most knowledge workers find it difficult to stop thinking about their work. There seems to be no escape and switching off is quite hard. By the way, when is your work actually finished? When are you 'done'? When have you polished the e-mail to perfection? How brilliant is your ideal proposal? When are your ready to say you have reached the ultimate decision? When a farmer is milking a cow, she knows when she is finished. But most knowledge-driven processes are far less clearly defined.
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In the meantime, you have an overload of thoughts. And that barrage of thoughts may very well interfere with more important issues. All your recent appointments, projects, ideas, priorities and promises each take up space in your mind. When we, at moreeffect, coach professionals we can easily make hundreds of 'loose ends' come to the surface. All those pieces of information demand a little bit of attention. Many of these thoughts only come to the surface at the most inconvenient moments. You are writing a proposal for a new project and suddenly it crosses your mind that you need to call the contractor for your house. You are doing your shopping at the supermarket and meanwhile you are worrying about tomorrow's meeting. Many people are no longer aware of how often they think of things they cannot do anything about at that particular moment. But every disruptive thought causes a little stress. And all those loose ends together cause a lot of stress. Unnecessary stress.
4.2.
A clear mind is more reliable
You cannot rely on your subconscious mind when organizing your work and life. In bed you suddenly remember that you promised to call a client. Oops forgotten! And when you wake up the next day you have forgotten it again. Your subconscious triggered the appropriate thought 'phone client' but at the wrong moment. Late in the afternoon yesterday would have been more practical because then you could still have phoned the client.
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Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind?
When you constantly think of things at the wrong moment you cannot be trusted to keep your appointments and deliver on your promises. Reliability is important because in the end life and work is all about people and relationships. And people will know whether they can rely on you. It will harm your relationships if you repeatedly break your promises, are slow in replying to emails, and lose grip on your work. All this causes even more stress. But don't even try and get the overload in your mind organized. Your mind is not made for this. By using a smart system (on paper or on the computer) that keeps track of all your appointments, promises, goals and actions you clear your subconscious mind, making room for lucidity and creativity. Outlook is a good system to achieve this. There are other possibilities, but this is a good option. Your subconscious won't give up easily. It will continue to interfere with the details of your life until it knows that you have a foolproof, external system that helps you get organized. Only then will your subconscious stop bothering you at the wrong moments. As soon as you have such a foolproof, external system set up, your head will become clear again and you will become more reliable at the same time. It is better for you and the people around you and your performance at work will improve.
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4.3.
A clear head makes it easy to organize your work and life
Overload makes it difficult to keep track of everything that is going on. Your subconscious can't prioritize. As David Allen says, an unsatisfactory telephone conversation might feel more important than the takeover of an entire company. How to set priorities is a question I have often been asked. The key problem with priorities is that you first need to list all the options available to you. Your subconscious is likely to be crammed with all kinds of things that need to be done; projects, plans and other activities. Every item triggers a specific emotion, but that does not really help when determining what needs to be done first. To set the right priorities you will need to consciously consider the importance of each item with regard to your life and your work. A total overview is essential. Using a good, reliable, external system does not only make you more reliable but it also provides a total overview of what is going on. And then all of a sudden you are able to set priorities.
4.4.
A clear head is more creative and more effective
The capacity of your mind is limited: the to-do list suppresses creativity. It is like the memory capacity of your computer: the short-term memory (RAM) has a limited storage capacity. You create RAM capacity when the data you don't need at that moment are saved on your hard disk. When you need those data again you retrieve them from your hard disk.
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Why would you want an empty inbox and a clear mind?
Similar processes take place in your head. By saving your entire to-do list in a fully reliable, external system, you create free space for creativity. And as a result your solutions will be smarter, your competitive strength and job satisfaction will increase. A clear head creates capacity to focus on what is really important in your job and life.
4.5.
A clear mind facilitates 'flow'
A clear head helps to concentrate better. And concentration is important to achieve 'flow'. A term coined by professor Csikszentmihalyi to indicate those moments when individuals are performing at their best. Try and think of the last time you lost all awareness of time, when you were totally absorbed by your work, solved complicated problems without any effort and felt highly effective. That is flow. Concentration and focus are very important to achieve flow. Uncoordinated thoughts about all kinds of things that need to be done disturb the flow that is so crucial to being effective. When you have an adequate, external system in place, it is easy and simple to store those thoughts to be looked at later. This is how you keep your head clear. With a clear head it is much easier to concentrate and get into the flow.
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4.6.
Who wants a mind full of thoughts?
Can a very busy person relax in a hammock, with a clear mind? Can you sleep at night knowing that there is lot of work waiting for you in the morning? Can you be very effective and be relaxed at the same time?
Yes indeed. All of this is possible. So why wouldn't you want it? Keeping a clear head is highly recommended. You become more reliable, you concentrate better, you are more effective, you stimulate your own creativity and you are less stressed out. The Getting Things Done methodology by David Allen offers a very practical guideline to achieve this. I was skeptical at first but after trying it out for a few weeks my head became clearer and I was calmer. Words cannot describe how good this feels. Since then, my team at moreeffect has inspired, trained, and coached thousands of people in working smarter with this method. This book is about using Microsoft Outlook as an adequate, swift, reliable external system. The tips are based on my own experience and the experience of hundreds of our clients.
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Navigation Pane
5. Navigation Pane WARNING
— Since Outlook 2007, you can hide or display the
Navigation Pane (at the left side of the Outlook window) by clicking Alt+F1. Hiding the Navigation Pane may cause you to not see the Folder List, or the Shortcuts that we will use in this book. For instance, if you press Ctrl+6 to display the Folder List and you don’t see it, please keep pressing Alt+F1 until the Navigation Pane appears again. The Navigation Pane
OUTLOOK 2007
Ctrl+F1 toggles the Ribbon, Alt+F1 toggles the Navigation Pane, Alt+F2 toggles the To-Do Bar
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How To Quickly Process E-mail
6. How To Quickly Process E-mail If you want clarity and an empty inbox, you’ll need to make a few decisions about each e-mail. Let’s try to summarize the basics of processing stuff, but then apply it to e-mail. 1. E-mail is collected automatically in your inbox. 2. To empty your inbox daily, you’ll have to make a conscious decision about each e-mail: a. Delete it from your inbox or b. Move it to another folder for further processing 3. Making decisions takes time and energy, so we’ll try to make these decisions as easy as possible. There are eight possible destinations for each e-mail: a. Recycle bin – the e-mail can be deleted b. Archive – there is no action associated with the e-mail, but I do not want to delete it either c. Someday/Maybe folder – there is an action associated with the e-mail, but I’m not going to take that action this workweek d. Two minute rule – I can complete the action within two minutes e. Calendar – the action (or information) in the email is date and/or time bound.
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f. Waiting For – I can delegate the required action, or there is no action on my part, I’ll just have to wait for someone else to take action g. Next Actions folder – I’ll have to take the next action myself, and I plan to do this action during this workweek h. Projects – this is a list of all projects that are currently active in your work or life
Projects list When an Expected Outcome needs more than one action, it is called a project. There are many different ways to track Projects – I myself use a mind map for that purpose. I create and maintain that mind map in FreeMind, which you can download from http://freemind.sourceforge.net/ I started out with a Projects folder in Outlook, so for anyone who wants to do that too, I’ll explain how to create a Projects folder in Outlook in Chapter 20. You don’t need to setup anything for deleting e-mails, or for the two-minute rule. The calendar is available by default and we’re going to use the default Tasks folder as the Next Actions folder. This leaves us with four new folders to create, which we will do in the next chapter: 1. Archive 2. Someday/Maybe 3. Waiting For 4. Projects
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How To Quickly Process E-mail
In addition to these four folders, you may want to setup a Tadaaa folder and an Ideas folder (see paragraph 21.2). People often use a Tadaaa folder to move completed items from their Task list to. This gives you a sense of accomplishment if you see at the end of the day how much you actually accomplished. There are many different ways to setup a proper e-mail archive. More discussion can be found in Chapter 18: Setting Up Archives.
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Setup Folders
7. Setup Folders 7.1.
Create New Folders
As discussed in chapter 0, we need to create a few extra folders in Outlook. This chapter shows you step-by-step how to create these folders. While setting up Outlook, we will create a few folders of type Task Items. This type of folder is much easier to work with on a daily basis than folders of type Mail and Post Items. In a Task folder, you can easily modify the subject and other properties of a task. It is much easier to add an item to a Task folder than it is having to compose an E-mail or Post for a Mail and Post folder. Chapter 18 contains more fundamental information on working with folders and items in Outlook.
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7.2.
Create the Archive Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “Archive” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Mail and Post Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. That item can be named “Personal Folders”, “Mailbox – Your Name” or any other name. The name doesn’t matter; it’s the topmost position in the hierarchy that counts. 5. Press the OK button
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Setup Folders
Creating the Archive folder, of type Mail and Post Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
Note: the name of the root folder “Personal Folders” doesn’t matter. We select this topmost (root) folder as the parent for our new folder, because that makes it much easier to quickly select that folder when copying or moving items (like e-mails) to it.
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7.3.
Create the Someday/Maybe Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “Someday/Maybe” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Task Items” from the dropdown box – this is different from the Archive folder! 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. 5. Press the OK button
Creating the Someday/Maybe folder, of type Task Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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Setup Folders
7.4.
Create the Waiting For Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “Waiting For” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Task Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. 5. Press the OK button
Creating the Waiting For folder, of type Task Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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7.5.
Create the Projects Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “Projects” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Task Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. 5. Press the OK button
Creating the Projects folder, of type Task Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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Setup Folders
7.6.
Create the XTadaaa Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
We call this folder XTadaaa to make sure it has a different first letter from the Tasks folder. The first characters of each name are used later to quickly navigate to a folder.
1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “XTadaaa” as name of the new folder to make sure that it has a different first letter from the Tasks folder 3. Choose “Task Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy. 5. Press the OK button
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Creating the XTadaaa folder, of type Task Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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Setup Folders
7.7.
Check Your Newly Created Folders
To check if all folders have been created properly, we’ll look for the newly created folders in the Folder List. Press Ctrl+6 to display the Folder List.
(+6
Display all folders in the Folder List
If all has gone well, you should see your new folders in this list, as shown in the next screenshot:
Ctrl+6 displays all folders, after creating the new folders
The icons indicate that the new Archive folder is an E-mail and Post item folder ( item folders (
), and that the other new folders are Task
). This is exactly how we want it.
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We will do more customization of our folders in later chapters, but in this book I want to move to the practical day-to-day reality as soon as possible.
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Create Shortcuts to Folders
8. Create Shortcuts to Folders 8.1.
Why Do We Need Shortcuts?
We need to define our own Shortcuts for a better overview over our work and life. Since Outlook 2003, the default view of the Navigation Pane shows all folders together of the same type. For instance, pressing Ctrl+1 displays only E-mail and Post Item folders, while pressing Ctrl+4 displays all Task Item folders:
Pressing Ctrl+4 displays all Task Item folders
For a better overview, we want to display folders of different types in one overview, but we do not want all folders to appear, as Ctrl+6 does. This view often includes many folders we do not need on a day to day basis, like for instance the Deleted Items folder. By using Shortcuts, we can define exactly which folders we want to see, whether they are Mail and Post Item folders, or Task Item folders, or folders of another type.
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8.2.
Defining Our Shortcuts View
(+7
Display Shortcuts
Pressing Ctrl+7 displays the Shortcuts view, as shown in the following screenshot. As you can see, it is empty now but we will start to add Shortcuts by clicking the “Add New Group” and the “Add New Shortcut” links.
Pressing Ctrl+7 displays the Shortcuts view
Repeatedly press the “Add New Shortcut” link and add the following folders: 1. Inbox 2. Archive 3. Tasks 4. Someday/Maybe 5. Waiting For 6. Projects 7. Sent Items 8. XTadaaa 9. Outbox 10. Notes
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Create Shortcuts to Folders
Repeatedly press the “Add New Group” link and create the following groups: 1. Mail 2. Actions 3. Miscellaneous The Shortcuts view now resembles something like this:
It’s time for some reorganization. Use the mouse to drag-anddrop each Shortcut to the right Group. It actually doesn’t matter which Shortcut ends up in which Group, as long as you are happy with the overview you create. You can even add other Groups, or remove Groups. It’s up to you, but this is what I did:
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As soon as you have added links to them, you can open and close the groups by clicking on their title (Mail, Actions, and Miscellaneous).
For clarity’s sake, you can delete the default Shortcuts group that contains the links to Outlook Today and Microsoft Office Online. Right-click the light blue Shortcuts group bar and select Remove Group from the popup menu.
Removing the default Shortcuts group
One last thing before we’re done: to use the standard Getting Things Done terminology, we’re going to rename the Tasks
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Create Shortcuts to Folders
shortcut to Next Actions. Please note that we rename just the Shortcut, not the actual folder itself. We do not create a new folder for Next Actions, but use the default Tasks folder, because this synchronizes better with a Smartphone. Also, Outlook 2003 will not trigger notifications for tasks in another folder than the default Tasks folder.
Right-click the Tasks item and choose Rename Shortcut from the popup menu. Type “Next Actions” and press the Enter button on your keyboard. This leaves us with the final Shortcuts view:
8.3.
Show Total Number of Items in Inbox
Outlook by default displays the number of unread items next to each shortcut. Because we want to process all our incoming e-mail and make sure that the inbox is empty once every day, we want to see the total number of items in the inbox, not just the number of unread items.
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Right-click the Inbox shortcut and choose Properties from the menu:
Select the option button before Show total number of items, and then press the OK button.
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Create Shortcuts to Folders
Select the option button before Show total number of items
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Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency
9. Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency Now we’ll only have to add a toolbar with two buttons before we can start with processing e-mails from our inbox. These two buttons will make it much easier to copy and move Outlook items (like e-mails); something we’ll often do during emptying our inbox. At the top of the Outlook screen, you’ll find the Standard toolbar. Apart from this Standard toolbar, you can find other toolbars in Outlook, like the Advanced toolbar, the Web toolbar, and maybe the Google toolbar or other custom or third-party toolbars.
The Standard button bar on top of the Outlook screen
Let’s first add a new toolbar ourselves: 1. Right-click the Standard toolbar and choose the option Customize… from the popup menu. 2. In the Customize dialog, press the New… button 3. In the New Toolbar dialog, specify EachDayEmpty as the name for your new toolbar:
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4. Press the OK button to close the New Toolbar dialog and create the toolbar. Do not close the Customize dialog yet. 5. If the toolbar is floating around, drag it to the top of the Outlook window with your mouse to dock it. Be sure to start dragging in the top left corner of the new toolbar, as you can see in this image:
As soon as you dock the toolbar next to the Standard toolbar, it will be empty, as you can see in this image:
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Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency
Now that we have our new toolbar, let’s add two buttons to it, a Copy Item button and a Move Item button: 1. Navigate to the Commands tab in the Customize dialog:
2. In the list box on the left side, select the Edit category 3. Then, in the list box on the right side, select the Copy to Folder… item
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4. Drag-and-drop this item to your newly created toolbar at the top of the screen:
5. Now, do the same with the Move to Folder… item that is just above the Copy to Folder… item in the list box at the right side of the Customize dialog:
Notice that the first button contains a text caption, while the second button only contains an image caption. We’re going to modify that now, so do not close the Customize dialog yet. 6. Right-click the new Move to Folder… button on the new toolbar that is represented by the image only (
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).
Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency
7. Select from the popup menu: Text Only (Always)
8. Both buttons now have a Text Only caption:
9. Right-click the Copy to Folder… button and edit the Name of the button, so that it is called “&1 Copy”. Mind the ampersand (&); this is important for accessing the button by keyboard.
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10. Right-click the Move to Folder… button and edit the Name of the button, so that it is called "&2 Move". Again, mind the ampersand (&).
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Creating a New Toolbar For Maximum Efficiency
11. If all is well, you now have a new toolbar with two buttons on it:
12. Press the Close button on the Customize dialog. This will also remove the black rectangle around the currently selected button. If you don’t have an item (email, task, …) selected in Outlook, the buttons may gray out. Don’t worry, that’s okay.
That’s it. You have setup all necessary folders and created a brand new toolbar with two buttons. Finally, we can start processing our e-mails. If you are still in a setup-mood, you could turn to Chapter 11, and setup the [w] rule that will save you a lot of time when sending e-mails to delegate or order stuff!
Note: some people report that they lost their new buttons after restarting Outlook. This seems to be a bug in Outlook. However, there is a simple workaround: create the new buttons again, but put them in the Standard Toolbar of Outlook, not in a new toolbar as I describe in this chapter.
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10. Processing Your E-mail to Empty the Inbox Now that we have done the basic setup of our folders, let’s see how we can process our e-mail as quickly as possible. A main difference with how people often process their e-mail is that in this system, you process your e-mails one at the time. The first time you read the e-mail, you make a decision on the next thing you’d like to do with it, whether it will be a concrete action or a reminder to yourself that you need to do more thinking. After making a decision about each e-mail, it is removed from your inbox. In most cases, it will be moved to the Archive, where you can access it for further processing. Meanwhile, a task is added to one of your lists to remind you of the work you decided you want to do. This whole process is explained in detail in this chapter. Each incoming e-mail asks for a decision. David Allen has described these kinds of decisions in his book, “Getting Things Done”. I will describe the questions step-by-step and add the necessary steps to process each e-mail correctly in Outlook.
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10.1. Is This Message SPAM? Can you just delete this message? If so, don’t hesitate: press the Delete button. This is by far the quickest way to remove emails from your inbox.
$
Delete is your friend
If you keep receiving unwanted e-mails from the same sender, you can add the sender to the Blocked Senders List. To do this, right-click the message and select from the popup menu: Junk E-mail | Add Sender to Blocked Senders List:
Right-click an e-mail and block further e-mails from the same sender from your inbox
Adding someone to your Blocked Senders List probably takes less time than unsubscribing from a mailing list. Besides: if you try to unsubscribe from SPAM, this will only let the sender know that you do read your email, thereby increasing the motivation to send you more SPAM (probably from a different address).
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10.2. Question: Is It Actionable During This Week? The next question is: Is it actionable during this week (the next 7 days)? There are only two possible answers to this question: “No” and “Yes”. Yes, I know, some situations are too ambiguous for a comfortable No or Yes. But even then, you have to make a decision. If you want to err on the safe side and choose Yes too often, that is perfectly fine. In that case, you will end with too many items on your Next Actions (Tasks) list, but you can always easily move items to the Someday/Maybe list later. I don’t know where the idea of limiting the amount of time to one week comes from. Personally, I’m sure I learned it from David Allen himself, but others accuse me from having made this up myself. However, I find that limiting this period to one week is healthy and makes things clear, so I’ll stick to it in this book.
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10.3. Answer 1/4: No, it is not actionable at all, and I want to delete this e-mail. If there is no action associated with a certain e-mail, the first alternative is that you want to delete the e-mail. This seems obvious, as this is what we do with letters, brochures and other paper-based communications. Apart from obvious SPAM, I don’t just delete e-mails if I don’t need them anymore. Let me explain. Storage costs are going down all the time. The amount of e-mail that you can store on a single hard drive is mind blowing. And I never know whether an e-mail that I don’t consider to be of any use right now, may turn into something that I’d like to be able to find and re-read later. The costs in time and money of archiving email are tiny compared to setting up and maintaining a proper paper-based archive. Instead of deleting an e-mail, I move it to the Archive folder. That means I can always find it later, if needed. I don’t worry about the costs of storing e-mails and I don’t have to worry about making a wrong decision when deleting an e-mail forever. This makes archiving an e-mail as painless as possible. Yes, I do have an archive with e-mail from the past 10 years – and sometimes that comes in rather handy. In Chapter 18: Setting Up Archives, we’ll talk a bit more about different ways of archiving e-mails.
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With the new buttons on our toolbar, we can quickly move an e-mail to the Archive.
%+2
Move an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+2 to activate our new Move button
2. With the Move Items dialog showing, press the “A” on your keyboard to select the first folder that starts with the letter A: Archive.
3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard, to activate the OK button, thereby move the e-mail message to the Archive and close the Move Items dialog. That’s it.
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From e-mail to Archive Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, * The amazing thing is that if you do this for a week or so, your fingers will pick up on the sequence and will start to automatically type Alt+2, A, Enter for any message that you want to move to the Archive. This may seem like a small thing, but the more you can automate the mechanics of processing e-mail (like letting your fingers do it automatically, instead of having to watch for the mouse cursor to drag-and-drop the e-mail), the faster you’ll become at processing e-mail. This technique can speed up emptying your inbox by a whopping 35%!
10.4. Answer 2/4: No, it is actionable, but not during this week. If there is an action associated with an e-mail, but you’re not going to do that action during this week, you should move it to the Someday/Maybe list. Each week during your Weekly Review, you’ll process the items on this list and decide again if they will be done during the week that follows your review. This approach makes sure that you can happily forget about the mail for one week, while not
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having to worry that it will fall off the table. It is stored safely in the Someday/Maybe list in Outlook. Adding the e-mail to the Someday/Maybe list is a two-step process. First, we’ll copy the e-mail to the Someday/Maybe list, and then we’ll move the e-mail to the Archive.
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+1 to activate our new Copy button
2. With the Copy Items dialog showing, press the “S” and the “O” on your keyboard to select the first folder that starts with the letters “So”: Someday/Maybe.
If you only press the letter ‘S’, you’d select the Sent Items folder. If you find that this takes too much typing, you could always rename the Someday/Maybe folder and make sure that the first letter of the folder name is unique.
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3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard to activate the OK button, thereby copying the e-mail message to the Someday/Maybe folder and close the Copy Items dialog. 4. Outlook will now display the new Task item in the Someday/Maybe folder. Close the item by pressing Alt+S (Save). We will do no editing of this item, as we are only going to review it once a week anyway. We can always edit it later if we want to.
%+2
Move an Item to another folder
5. Press Alt+2 to activate our new Move button
6. With the Move Items dialog showing, press the “A” on your keyboard to select the first folder that starts with the letter A: Archive.
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7. Press the Enter key on the keyboard, to activate the OK button, thereby moving the e-mail message to the Archive and close the Move Items dialog. If you condense this procedure to the keys you’ll have to press, it’s actually quite quick.
From e-mail to Someday/Maybe list 1. Copy the e-mail to the Someday/Maybe folder:
%+1 SO, * %+S 2. Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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10.5. Answer 3/4: No, it is not actionable, but I do want to archive it. As we have seen, I advocate a policy where you don’t just delete e-mail, but you move them to the Archive if you don’t need them anymore. That means for this question from the Getting Things Done schema, you’ll process e-mails exactly as I described in paragraph 10.3 above.
From e-mail to Archive Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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10.6. Answer 4/4: Yes, it is actionable and I want to do it during this week. If you answer “Yes” to the question “Is it actionable during this week?”, things get very interesting. This is something you cannot just delete, archive, or defer to think about later. You’ll have to make a few tough decisions right now. 1. What is my Expected Outcome? Peter Drucker teaches us to make up our mind about what we really want, before taking action on it. If you start with the end in mind, you’ll clear up a lot of ambiguity that surrounds knowledge work. Examples of Expected Outcomes: a. Computer is delivered b. Garage cleaned out c. Mortgage secured d. Project members updated on status e. Department reorganized 2. What is the Next Action? The Next Action should be the first, small and practical action that you would take to move into the direction of your Expected Outcome. Examples of Next Actions: a. Call John b. Pick up garbage c. Fill in forms d. Send e-mail e. Speak to Hannah
In his book Getting Things Done, David Allen thoroughly discusses these questions. In this book, we focus on the Outlook-side of things, but you will probably benefit from reading his explanations of these questions.
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Now that you have defined your Expected Outcome and know what the Next Action is, it’s time for some more categorizing.
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10.7. Alternative 1/4: The Next Action can be done within 2 minutes. The Two Minute Rule says that if you can complete a Next Action within two minutes, it is more efficient to do it right away, than to organize and defer the task. For instance: if you can send a reply to an e-mail within two minutes, you had better do it as soon as you have read that email. After finishing your Two Minutes Action, you will have to archive the e-mail, which we explained in paragraph 10.3 above.
From e-mail to Archive Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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10.8. Alternative 2/4: The Next Action is day or time specific. If the Next Action is day-specific, or time-specific, you’ll have to enter that action in your Calendar. You could do that by pressing Ctrl+Shift+A to create a new Appointment. You can also copy the e-mail to your Calendar, just as you can copy an e-mail to a Someday/Maybe folder, or other folder.
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+1 to activate our new Copy button
2. With the Copy Items dialog showing, press the “C” on your keyboard to select the Calendar folder.
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3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard, to activate the OK button, thereby copying the e-mail message to the Calendar and close the Copy Items dialog. 4. Outlook will now display a new Appointment item, with the text of the e-mail in the body of the new Appointment item.
5. If this is a date and time-specific appointment: press Alt+R to set the focus to the Start time edit box. Type the Start date and press the Tab-key to move to the time edit box. If this appointment is only day-specific: press Alt+V to check the All day event checkbox. 6. Press Alt+U to select the Subject edit box. Then modify the Subject of this Appointment, so that it makes sense to you when browsing through your calendar.
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If you have to make a call, it may be helpful to type the phone number in the Subject. This saves you from having to lookup the number when you’re about to make the call.
7. Press Alt+S to Save and Close the Appointment item. (This is a very useful keyboard shortcut from Outlook 2003 that still works in Outlook 2007, even though it is not advertised as being a shortcut anymore.) Now that we have added the appointment to our calendar, we still have to move the e-mail to our Archive, just as we did before in paragraph 10.3.
From e-mail to Calendar 1. Copy the e-mail to the Calendar:
%+1 C, * - Modify the properties of the new Appointment Item.
%+S 2. Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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10.9. Alternative 3/4: You can delegate the Next Action, or the Expected Outcome. Delegating the Next Action or the Expected Outcome can often be a Two Minute-item: forwarding an e-mail with some instructions, or calling someone. As soon as you have delegated something, you’ll want to put the item on your Waiting For list, so that your mind can stop bothering you about it. During your Weekly Review, you’ll review the Waiting For list to see if there is any follow-up action to take. The word “delegate” is used in a broad sense here; asking questions, placing orders, allocating work to another department etc. are all things that you are waiting for. The Next Action is not yours, it’s somebody else’s. Putting an incoming e-mail on your Waiting For list is just as easy as putting it on the Someday/Maybe list.
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+1 to activate our new Copy button
2. With the Copy Items dialog showing, press the “W” on your keyboard to select the Waiting For folder.
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3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard to activate the OK button, thereby copying the e-mail message to the Someday/Maybe folder and close the Copy Items dialog. 4. Outlook will now display the new Task item in the Waiting For folder. Close the item by pressing Alt+S (Save). We will do no editing of this item, as we are only going to review it once a week anyway. We can always edit it later if we want to. Now that we have added the appointment to our calendar, we still have to move the e-mail to our Archive, just as we did before in paragraph 10.3.
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From e-mail to Waiting For list 1. Copy the e-mail to the Waiting For folder:
%+1 W, * %+S 2. Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, * Putting e-mails that you sent yourself on your Waiting For list is even easier. I describe a neat technique involving a [w] in the body of your mail in Chapter 11: Fill Your Waiting For List With [w].
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10.10. Alternative 4/4: Put the Next Action on your Next Actions list (Tasks folder). Finally, we’re left with all e-mails that we do want to take action on this week, but it can’t be done in two minutes, it is not date/time specific, and worst of all: we cannot delegate it to someone else. We’ll have to put it on our own Next Actions lists (in the Tasks folder).
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
1. Press Alt+1 to activate our new Copy button
2. With the Copy Items dialog showing, press the “T” on your keyboard to select the Tasks folder.
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3. Press the Enter key on the keyboard, to activate the OK button, thereby copying the e-mail message to the Tasks folder and close the Copy Items dialog. 4. Outlook will now display the new Task item in the Tasks folder, with the text of the e-mail in the body of the new Task item.
5. Because this is a Next Action for yourself, we’ll modify the Subject of the task to contain: a. Your Expected Outcome (“Printer ok”), b. A slash (/) c. And the Next Action (“Walk over to Anne”) Together this looks like this: Printer ok / Walk over to Anne 6. Press Alt+U to select the Subject edit box, and then type the new Subject.
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If you press Alt+U the whole subject is selected. If you just start typing, Outlook will remove the selected text automatically. You do not have to press Backspace or Delete to do that. If, however, you do want to keep the text that is already in the subject, just press Alt+U to select the subject, and then press the right- or left-key to move the caret to the right or left side of the subject.
7. There is one more thing to consider for a Next Action: where do you need to be to do the action? Or what do you need to be able to do the action? This is what David calls the “context” for an action. Examples of contexts are: a. At home b. At the office c. At phone d. At computer e. Anywhere f. Errands g. …
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In Outlook, we can assign categories to a task to specify which context we need for this Next Action. Assigning categories is different in Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007.
Categories in Outlook 2003 OUTLOOK 2003
When you use Outlook 2003, the Task Item
has a button at the bottom right, named Categories. You can access this button by pressing Alt+G. If you adapt the Master Category List to contain all contexts that you regularly use, you can quickly and easily add a context to each new task.
Categories in Outlook 2007 OUTLOOK 2007
In Outlook 2007, the Categories subsystem
has been overhauled. Categories are color-coded, which is an advantage, but also much less keyboard-friendly, which is a major disadvantage if you want to work quickly and efficiently. To access the categories for a Task Item, you first press and release (!) the Alt key on your keyboard. Outlook will now display some possible keys to access items on the Ribbon:
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Press the H ( ) button on your keyboard, to select the Task tab and display the other keys for accessing items on the Task tab. Outlook will display the G ( ) near the categories button:
Press the G button on your keyboard, to display the available categories:
If you press the A button for All Categories…, you can change the names of the categories to reflect your contexts. You can even assign a shortcut key to each individual category.
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8. After selecting a category for your Next Action, close the item by pressing Alt+S (Save). Now that we have added the Next Action to our Next Actions (Tasks) list, we still have to move the e-mail to our Archive, just as we did before in paragraph 10.3.
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The whole procedure for placing an e-mail on our Next Actions list is then as follows:
From e-mail to Next Actions (Tasks) list 1. Copy the e-mail to the Tasks folder:
%+1 T, * - Modify the subject: Expected Outcome / Next Action - Choose a category (context) for the Next Action
%+S 2. Move the e-mail to the Archive:
%+2 A, *
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Fill Your Waiting For List With [w]
11. Fill Your Waiting For List With [w] Copying incoming e-mails to your Waiting For list has been made much easier with the buttons on our own toolbar. By far the easiest way to add items to your Waiting For list is by letting Outlook do it for you any time you send an e-mail that you want to put on the Waiting For list. If you delegate, order, or ask anything by e-mail, you can instruct Outlook to add that e-mail to a Waiting For list, by adding a simple [w] to the body of the e-mail. A [w] at the bottom of your e-mail is so inconspicuous, that most people will not even notice it (test it!). However, it can be a powerful tool to keep your Waiting For list up to date and your mind at rest. To enable this feature, we’ll have to create a new WaitingFor-E-mail folder and add a rule. Unfortunately Outlook cannot automatically copy sent e-mails to a Task Items folder, so we are going to create a second Waiting For list, this time as an E-mail and Post Items folder.
11.1. Create a New WaitingFor…e-mail Folder
(+'+E
Create New Folder
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1. Press Ctrl+Shift+E to create a new folder 2. Specify “WaitingFor-E-mail” as name of the new folder 3. Choose “Mail and Post Items” from the dropdown box 4. Select the highest (root) folder in the folder hierarchy 5. Press the OK button
Creating the WaitingFor-E-mail folder, of type Mail and Post Items, as a subfolder of the root folder
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Fill Your Waiting For List With [w]
11.2. Add a rule to copy outgoing e-mails with a [[w] in the body to the new WaitingFor-e-mail folder 1. From the main menu select Tools | Rules and Alerts…
(If your Outlook is setup to connect with an Exchangeserver, you may not be able to open this Rules and Alerts dialog, until you are connected to the Exchangeserver.) 2. Press the New Rule… button
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3. Select the option “Check messages after sending”
4. Press the Next button
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5. Select the item “with specific words in the body”
6. Click with your mouse on the blue underlined text at the bottom: “specific words” to display the Search Text dialog:
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7. Type [w] in the upper edit box:
8. Press the Add button:
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9. Press the OK button 10. Press the Next button 11. Select the item “move a copy to a specified folder”:
12. Click with your mouse on the blue underlined text at the bottom: “specified” to display the Rules and Alerts folder find dialog. Select the WaitingFor-E-mail folder, then press the OK button:
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13. Press the Finish button to return to the Rules and Alerts dialog 14. Press the OK button to return to the main Outlook window
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11.3. Test your new [w] rule Now test your new [w] rule to see if it works. 1. Press Ctrl+Shift+M to create a new e-mail 2. Compose and send a new e-mail to yourself. Don’t forget to add a [w] to the body of this e-mail.
3. After sending this e-mail, press Ctrl+Y and navigate to the WaitingFor-E-mail folder, then press the OK button:
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4. If everything has been set up correctly, you should see a copy of the message that you sent, with the [w] in it:
It took a few steps to setup, but now you can add a [w] to any e-mail you send and Outlook will automatically archive a copy for you in the WaitingFor-E-mail folder.
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Fill Your Waiting For List With [w]
The one thing you now have to do is review the WaitingFor-E-mail folder every week (or more often if your situation calls for that) and check if there is any follow up you need to do. Your subconscious mind can forget about these things, as they are safe in the folder.
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Working From Your Lists
12. Working From Your Lists 12.1. Overview of the runway You can now work from your lists, especially from the Calendar and the Next Actions list. These two provide you with an overview of the runway of your work: the appointments and actions for the coming days. The Calendar gives you an overview of the hard landscape for each day. If you follow the instructions that I have outlined above, you will only add day- and time-specific appointments, actions and information to your Calendar. If you view your Calendar, you know exactly which commitments have to be kept that day. The Next Actions list contains all actions that you decided you want to do during this week. As soon as you have time available, you can turn to the Next Actions list and see what you already decided to do.
12.2. A Unified View If you prefer to work with a unified view of both your
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Calendar and your Next Actions list, you can display the Task list next to the Calendar. OUTLOOK 2003
You can display the task list next to your Calendar
(Ctrl+2), by choosing View | Task list from the main menu. Right-click the title bar of the Task list to modify the Filter and Group-by options of the View. See Chapter 0 below for more information on using Views. OUTLOOK 2007
In any view in Outlook (Calendar, Inbox, etc.) you
can display the To-Do Bar (Alt+F2) to view your task list at the right side of the screen. This To-Do Bar can also show upcoming appointments. You can modify the appearance of the To-Do Bar via the main menu: View | To-Do Bar.
12.3. Accessing e-mails when needed As you’ve noticed, I suggest moving all incoming e-mails to the Archive, as soon as you’ve made a decision about what to do with the mail. When copying e-mails to your Next Actions list, the text of the e-mail is copied to the Task item, but you cannot use that directly to reply to the e-mail, nor are any attachments available in the Task item. My solution to that problem is to find the e-mail in the Archive, if I need it to complete a Next Action. Actually, that’s quite easy and fast if you use one of two sorting orders in your Archive. There are two sorting orders that I regularly use in the Archive folder: 1. By Date (View | Arrange By | Date – Alt+V, Enter, D) 2. By Sender (View | Arrange By | From – Alt+V, Enter, F)
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These two sorting orders enable me to quickly find almost any message that I need to see. In the By Sender sorting order, you can just type the first letters of the name of the sender, to move to the e-mails that were sent by that person. Combined with the option View | Arrange By | Show in Groups this gives me a very fast way of finding any e-mail that I need. For any e-mails that I cannot find this way, I use Outlook’s built-in search features, which I’ll cover in Chapter 16.
To make sure that your lists provides the best overview of your work and life, let’s introduce views and remove and resize some columns, group tasks by their context and do some more fun things. First, let’s talk about folders.
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Folders, Items and Views
13. Folders, Items and Views Before I can explain the concept of views and how you can make them work for you, I need to give you some fundamental information about folders and items. I’ll keep it short.
13.1. Outlook Folders are like Explorer Folders Folders in Outlook are like folders on your hard disk, which you can see in Windows Explorer. There are some subtle differences. Folders on your hard disk contain files; folders in Outlook contain items. Folders on your hard disk can contain other folders; so can folders in Outlook. Even though most people don’t realize this until they see the complete Folder List. Press Ctrl+6 to view the Folder List in Outlook and you’ll see the complete folder hierarchy. Outlook folders normally contain only items of just one type. Folders on your hard disk can contain many different types of files. One folder can contain Executables (.exe), Photos (.jpg) and Documents (.doc) all mixed together.
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At the time you create a new Outlook folder, you specify which type of items you want to store in that folder. As soon as you copy an item from one folder to another, Outlook converts the item to the type of the destination folder. That is why you can copy an e-mail to a task items folder and see it turned into a new Task Item. There are some exceptions to this rule that are only of interest to super users and administrators.
13.2. Display the Folder List
(+6
Display the Folder List
The Folder List displays the complete folder hierarchy in Outlook, including all folders of any type that are available right now. You can also display all folders of a specific type:
(+1
Display all E-mail folders
(+2
Display all Calendar folders
(+3
Display all Contacts folders
(+4
Display all Task folders
(+5
Display all Notes folders
(+6
Display the Folder List with all folders
(+7
Display Shortcuts (see chapter 8)
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13.3. Display a specific Folder Working with Outlook, you’ll often want to open a specific folder, like the Tasks folder, the Projects folder, or the WaitingFor folder. The shortcut keys above don’t provide much convenience in that case, because they display all folders of a specific type, not the specific folder that you want to access at that moment. Fortunately, Outlook provides a shortcut key to go to a specific folder:
(+Y
Go to a specific folder
13.4. A Folder is just a list with items It’s important to remember that a folder is just a list with items, even if it doesn’t look like one. Take for instance the Calendar – it displays as a proper calendar with appointments, events and a time scale. Behind the scenes it is a list like any other, which you can see when you display the All Appointments view of the Calendar. From the main menu select: 1. View 2.
OUTLOOK 2003
Arrange By…
3. Current View 4. All Appointments This will show you a list with all appointments, instead of the regular calendar view.
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The Calendar is a list like any other folder
To revert to the default view, select from the main menu: 1. View 2.
OUTLOOK 2003
Arrange By…
3. Current View 4. Day/Week/Month
13.5. The View determines which items you see and how they are displayed Each folder is, behind the screens, just a list of items. The Current View determines how you actually see these items. A View can sort, filter, group or otherwise manipulate the items on the screen. Even if you do not see all items in the folder because of the filter, they are still in the folder. EXAMPLE
— In the task list, one View could show all tasks that
are not yet completed, while another View shows all completed tasks. The folder itself however, contains all items: both completed and not completed tasks.
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Setup Views For a Folder
14. Setup Views For a Folder Outlook has great features for customizing the way you see the data in a folder. Let’s see how that works for our Next Actions list.
14.1. Create a new View Let’s create a new View before we start modifying the View. In this way, we can always revert to the default View if we make a mistake. 1. Go to the Tasks list (Ctrl+Y, T, Enter) 2. From the main menu, choose: a. View b.
OUTLOOK 2003
Arrange By…
c. Current View d. Define Views… This will open the Custom View Organizer:
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3. Press the Copy… button to create a copy of the Current view settings. 4. Specify a name for the new view. I suggest that you start the name with an underscore (_), so that you can easily recognize it later.
5. The Customize View dialog will now open to enable you to change the settings for this new view:
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Setup Views For a Folder
6. Press the Other Settings… button to make some basic changes to Other Settings:
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You could, for instance, press the Row Font… button to change the font that is used to display the lines in the grid. I find that simply setting this to a font and a font size that suits you, can tremendously improve your happiness in working with Outlook. 7. Press the OK button to close the Other Settings dialog 8. Press the OK button to close the Customize View dialog 9. Press the Apply View button to close the Custom View dialog and start using our new _Next Actions View You should now see the lines in your Tasks folder displayed in the font that you selected. You can always open the Customize View dialog later to make further changes to your View.
14.2. Select a specific view Let me show you three different ways to select a specific View for a folder: 1. Via the main menu 2. Via the Advanced Toolbar 3. By adding a button to our own toolbar 1. You can select a specific view via the main menu. 10. Go to the Tasks list (Ctrl+Y, T, Enter) 11. From the main menu, choose: e. View f.
OUTLOOK 2003
Arrange By…
g. Current View
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Setup Views For a Folder
This will display a list of Views for the current folder, from which you can select the View that you want:
2. You can select a specific view via the Advanced Toolbar. 1. Right-click on one of the toolbars or the main menu at the top of the screen 2. Select the Advanced toolbar, so that it will be checked:
3. The Advanced toolbar contains a dropdown box that shows all available views. If you click the triangle, the
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dropdown box will be shown for you to select your desired view:
3. You can add a button to our own Custom Toolbar. 1. Right-click the EachDayEmpty toolbar and select Customize… from the popup menu 2. Navigate to the Commands tab 3. In the Categories list box on the left, select View 4. Then, in the Commands list box on the right, select Current View
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Setup Views For a Folder
5. Drag-and-drop the Current View item to the EachDayEmpty toolbar
6. Right-click the new Current View button on the toolbar and edit the Name of the button, so that it is called “&0 View”. Notice that the “0” is a zero and mind the ampersand (&); this is important for accessing the button by keyboard.
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7. Press the Close button on the Customize dialog. From now on, you can press Alt+0 (zero) to open a dropdown box with all available views, while the button itself takes up much less screen real estate than the one on the Advanced toolbar. Unfortunately, after displaying the dropdown list, you cannot press the first letter of your desired view to activate it. You’ll have to select it with the up and down arrows on your keyboard. My suggestion is to press the up arrow four or five times, until you reach the view that you want.
14.3. Remove columns Removing columns from a view is as easy as dragging the column title away from the title bar of the grid. The other way to remove a column is to right-click the title of the column and select Remove This Column from the popup menu. The default view for the Tasks folder looks like this:
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Setup Views For a Folder
Personally, I don’t like the Due Date field in that view. I’d much rather put anything that is date-specific (like a due date) in my Calendar. So let’s remove the Due Date column from the view by rightclicking the Due Date column title and selecting Remove This Column.
Any columns in a view that you do not use should be removed from the field. This avoids clutter and helps you in focusing on what you are trying to accomplish. And remember: the data in the column itself is not gone, it’s still in
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the folder. It is just the view that doesn’t show this column anymore.
14.4. Add column Adding a column is easy, too. You just right-click the grid’s title bar, select Field Chooser from the popup menu and drag-anddrop the column that you want to add to the title bar. Let’s add the Categories field to our view: 1. Right-click the title bar 2. Select Field Chooser from the popup menu
3. Select the category for the column that you want to add from the top drop-down box, so that it will be displayed in the list. 4. Drag-and-drop the Categories field to the title bar of the grid, until it snaps into place:
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Setup Views For a Folder
5. Close the Field Chooser by clicking the X ( ).
14.5. Add a Custom Field If you want, you can define your own custom fields and use them in your view, in addition to the ones that are already predefined in Outlook. You may, for instance, want to create a Project field for each task, to track the Project that the task is part of. Personally, I don’t do this. It takes too much administration time to keep all this information synced. It isn’t necessary for me to track this information, especially not as I list the Expected Outcome (which is the project’s name) in front of each Next Action, as I described above. See Chapter 20 for more discussion of tracking projects and actions.
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OPTIONAL
— Add a Custom Project Field to the view:
1. Right-click the title bar of the grid 2. Select Field Chooser from the popup menu 3. Press the New… button at the bottom of the Field Chooser 4. Specify the Name of the new field and the type of information that you want to store in it:
5. Press the OK button 6. The new field will now be displayed in a special category in the Field Chooser: User-defined fields in folder:
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Setup Views For a Folder
7. Drag-and-drop the new Project field to the title bar of the grid, as shown above with the Categories field (paragraph 14.4) The new Custom Project Field is now shown as a new column in the view:
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14.6. Sorting data Sorting data is as easy as clicking on the title of a column. Clicking again on the same column title will sort the column upside-down. A small triangle indicates the sort order.
14.7. Column width With the mouse, you can drag the edges of a column title to make the column wider or smaller.
14.8. Group by a field Grouping by a field is a powerful way to organize a long list of items into more discrete groups. Let’s group the Next Actions list by the Categories field, so that we have all actions grouped by context. In the meantime, I have specified the categories for the Next Actions in this list, as described in paragraph 10.10.
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Setup Views For a Folder
Group by the categories column: 1. Right-click the Categories column title 2. Select Group By This Field from the popup menu
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This will show the Next Actions grouped by context:
You can expand and collapse each group individually with the left and right arrow key on your keyboard. When you use the up and down arrow keys to navigate through the list, you’ll find that it sometimes skips over the rows with the names of the groups. This is inconvenient, as it makes it more difficult to expand/collapse groups by keyboard. Fortunately, you can press Alt+Up or Alt+Down to avoid skipping over the group names.
Use the main menu to expand or collapse all groups at the same time: View | Expand/Collapse Groups | Collapse All Groups, and View | Expand/Collapse Groups | Expand All Groups
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Setup Views For a Folder
To save screen real estate, you may want to right-click the title bar of the grid again, and select Group By Box. This will remove the Group By box, which you won’t need during normal operations anyway:
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14.9. Add a filter to the view You can add a filter to a view to display only a subset of the items in the folder. Let’s add a filter to this view, so that we will not see any completed items in our Next Actions list. If you want to use the XTadaaa list, you just move each completed item to the XTadaaa list (via our new toolbar: Alt+2, X, Enter) after marking it complete. In that case, you don’t want to filter your Next Actions list to only show completed actions, because that would make it cumbersome to find and move the completed items to your XTadaaa list again.
Add a filter to this view to show only non-completed items: 1. Right-click the title bar of the grid 2. Select Customize Current View… 3. Press the Filter… button
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Setup Views For a Folder
4. Navigate to the Advanced tab in the Filter dialog:
5. Press the Field button 6. Select Frequently-used fields from the popup menu 7. Select Complete from the sub menu
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8. Make sure that the specified condition is “equals”, and the specified value is “No”. Then press the Add to List button to add this filter condition to the list of conditions.
9. Press the OK button to close the Filter dialog 10. Press the OK button to close the Customize View dialog
Now as soon as you check the box at the beginning of a task, it will disappear from your view. It will still be available as an item in the folder though, which you can see by selecting a different view, like the built-in Completed Tasks view (via our own toolbar: Alt+0, Completed Tasks).
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Setup Views For a Folder
14.10. The Customize View dialog Use the Customize View Dialog to adapt any setting of your view. You can use this dialog to select Fields, to Group By certain fields, to Sort and Filter your view. This is also the place to change the fonts for your grid. You can open the Customize View Dialog by right-clicking the title bar of the grid and selecting Customize Current View…, or you can use the main menu: View | (Arrange By) | Current View | Customize Current View…
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14.11. Useful View Settings Let’s review some useful settings for the views of the different folders.
Next Actions List We set up our own view for the Next Actions List (Tasks Folder) already. I suggest you use a font that you like, group the items by the Categories field and make sure that any field that you’re not actively using is removed from the view. I suggest that you filter the view so that any completed items are not displayed, or that you move all completed items to the XTadaaa list yourself.
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Setup Views For a Folder
To-Do Bar The To-Do Bar (Alt+F2) is not a folder per se, but you can modify it by right-clicking the title bar and selecting Custom… anyway. This menu item will display the Customize View Dialog (see paragraph 0). I suggest that you apply the same characteristics as for the Next Actions List, as described above.
Waiting For List The Waiting For List is reviewed only once a week (or more often if you need to), so I suggest you do not edit the subjects in this list as thoroughly as you should do for the Next Actions folder. This also means that you’d benefit from turning on the Reading Pane in this view. That gives you more information
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about the Waiting For item, especially if you copied it to the Waiting For list from an e-mail. To turn on the Reading Pane, select from the main menu: View | Reading Pane | Right
WaitingFor-E-mail List The WaitingFor-E-mail List is only reviewed once a week too, so I suggest you apply the same settings as described above for the Waiting For List.
Someday/Maybe List The WaitingFor-E-mail List is only reviewed once a week too, so I suggest you apply the same settings as described above for the Waiting For List.
Projects List The Projects List could be a simple list with just the names of your current projects. I suggest you remove all superfluous fields from the view, like the Due Date field and the Mark Complete checkbox field. I also suggest you select a font that you like.
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Weekly Review
15. Weekly Review You need a Weekly Review to keep an overview over your work and life and to make sure that your mind still trusts the system after a week of work. During the Weekly Review, you’ll review all items in the following folders: -
Calendar
-
Next Actions
-
Waiting For
-
Someday/Maybe
-
Projects
You basically check if these lists are still up-to-date, or if some items need to be added, removed or moved from one list to another. With the buttons on our own toolbar, it can be done quickly. The beauty of this whole system lies in the fact that you check your Calendar and Next Actions list on a daily basis. The Waiting For, Someday/Maybe and Projects list are only used to add new items. You have to review these lists only once a week during the Weekly Review. The fact that you can ignore all this information without any negative side effects greatly increases your focus throughout the week. Depending on your job, you may need to review your Waiting For list more often. Secretaries and Office Managers may even need to review their Waiting For list multiple times each day.
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Search
16. Search What is the use of storing all this information, if you cannot find it when you need it? Fortunately, your computer is probably much faster than you are at searching and finding information. Another advantage is that you can make a cup of coffee, while you put your computer to work to find the e-mail or document needed.
16.1. Quick Search in one folder
(+E
Search in the current folder
Press Ctrl+E to display or highlight the search row just above the grid, then enter the search phrase and press Enter. You can also press the Esc-key to cancel searching.
OUTLOOK 2003
In Outlook 2003, this will search through all items
in the folder, even the ones that are not shown due to a filter. I actually found that quite useful, but this behaviour is changed in Outlook 2007.
16.2. Search address books The Standard toolbar sports a Search address books feature that is really quick in finding contacts. The only problem that I
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see is that I cannot access it via a shortcut-key. You do need your mouse to use it.
16.3. Advanced Find
(+'+F
Advanced Find
Press Ctrl+Shift+F to display the Advanced Find dialog. This dialog allows you to execute much more complex searches, for instance through multiple folders or with more specific properties, like specific senders of e-mails or the status of tasks.
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Search
16.4. Search software Windows Vista and Office 2007 are integrated with Microsoft’s Windows Desktop Search feature. Windows Desktop Search cannot just search in Outlook, but can find e-mails and documents anywhere on your own computer. Via the main menu, Tools | Instant Search | Search Options… you can access the Search Options dialog which gives you the ability to select which data files should be indexed by Windows Desktop Search.
When working with Outlook 2003, I had very good experiences with Google Desktop, which you can download free from http://desktop.google.com
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Optimizing Outlook For Speed
17. Optimizing Outlook For Speed To efficiently work with Outlook, you’ll want to make some basic setup changes. By making a few small changes, you’ll be working more efficiently immediately.
17.1. Switch off new mail notifications Most knowledge workers suffer from a lack of concentration due to the unending distractions and interruptions during the day. A UC Irvine field study shows that you can expect to do only three minutes of work before being interrupted again by an incoming e-mail, instant message, phone call or co-worker. With Outlook, you can at least switch off the new mail notification. 1. From the main menu, choose: Tools | Options 2. Press the button E-mail Options… 3. In the E-mail Options dialog Press the button Advanced E-mail Options 4. In the Advanced E-mail Options dialog uncheck all items below “When new items arrive in my Inbox”: a. Uncheck Play a sound b. Uncheck Briefly change the mouse cursor c. Uncheck Show an envelope icon in the notification area d. And especially, uncheck Display a New Mail Desktop Alert
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5. Press the OK button three times to return to the main Outlook interface
Switching off e-mail notifications for more concentration and focus
17.2. Switch off MSN Integration to speed up Outlook To speed up Outlook, it is useful to disable the integration with the MSN or Live Messenger. 1. From the main menu, choose: Tools | Options 2. Navigate to the Other tab 3. Uncheck Display online status next to a person name 4. Press the OK button to return to the main Outlook interface www.eachdayempty.com
Optimizing Outlook For Speed
Switching off integration with MSN / Live Messenger
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Setting Up Archives
18. Setting Up Archives Let me explain two different ways of archiving e-mails and why I made my choices the way I did.
18.1. Alternative 1: One folder per subject, project, customer, employee, etc. Many people create a subfolder in their inbox for each subject, project, customer, employee or another description that makes sense to them. They archive any email that pertains to this description in the appropriate folder. The advantage of this method is that you can find any email that concerns that description in the same folder, even if the e-mail itself does not contain the name of the subject, project, customer or employee. Unfortunately, there are quite a few disadvantages to this approach. Let me name a few of them: 1. Archiving any e-mail asks for a decision. And as you know, making decisions takes time and energy and can very easily lead to procrastination, which results in a full and cluttered inbox. This is an undesired effect if you want overview and less stress.
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2. Some e-mails pertain to two or more subjects. In which folder or folders do you archive such e-mails? 3. You could accidentally misplace an e-mail in the wrong archive folder. This probably means that you’ll never find it again, apart from letting Outlook search through all archive folders. 4. The hierarchy of archive folders grows throughout the years, thereby becoming more and more unwieldy. Any overview that used to be there in the beginning is lost over the months and years. 5. To make the archive comprehensive, any sent e-mail should be added from the Sent Items folder to the archive folder too. This takes extra work. You can see that I’m not too optimistic about the efficiency of this way of archiving e-mail. Still, I’d like to point out one valid reason for creating an archive folder per subject: when you need to keep all mails that pertain to a certain subject together with an almost legal accuracy is when you’ll have to do this. So for a few projects I create subfolders to store all e-mail that pertains to those projects. For all other e-mail, I suggest you experiment with the use of just one folder as an archive. After four years, I can say that this works fine for me (and is much faster!).
18.2. Alternative 2: One folder for all archived mail I use one Archive folder that contains all archived e-mails from the past few months. This way I avoid having to make a decision about each e-mail that I want to archive. The procedure is easy: press Alt+2 (on our own toolbar), A, Enter. That’s the same procedure for each e-mail.
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Setting Up Archives
In paragraph 12.3, I have described how to quickly find e-mails in your Archive again.
Long-term archive For practical purposes, I move the e-mails from my Archive folder to another Long-term archive folder when they have become too old, or more accurately: when my Archive folder has become too big to be fast enough when searching through it. At the time of writing, my Archive contains 5,727 emails, which translates to roughly 3 months of incoming emails for me. On my current computer with my current setup, I still find sorting and searching through this amount of e-mails fast enough. As soon as I start questioning the performance of Outlook, I’ll move the oldest mails to my Long-term archive. In my case, this Long-term archive is located on my Exchange server, but you could very well create another .PST file, create a Long-term archive in that new .PST file and then move your messages to that .PST file. When you right-click the Archive folder in the Shortcuts view (Ctrl+7) and select Properties from the menu, you can navigate to the Auto Archive tab to have Outlook do this cleaning-up to a .PST file automatically for you.
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Note: if you use PST files make sure that you backup them frequently and reliably. Also it is best to not let them grow too big. I’d say that when your PST files reaches the 1 Gigabyte, you’d better start to split your data between two PST files.
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Stop Using Your Mouse
19. Stop Using Your Mouse When it comes to productivity, using your keyboard is the way to go. Outlook supports a tremendous amount of shortcuts that you don’t need to learn by heart immediately. If you remember to use Alt+1 and Alt+2 (for the Copy and Move buttons on our own toolbar), you will be able to empty your inbox much faster than the average individual who dragsand-drops e-mails to task lists with the mouse. You may notice that I describe dragging and dropping in some places, but these are situations where you set up something only once. As soon as it comes to day-to-day work, the keyboard is much faster.
Using the keyboard instead of the mouse can increase your productivity 40% for computer-intensive tasks like emptying your inbox.
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Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them
20. Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them The flexibility of Outlook brings with it a whole lot of ideas on how to connect projects with actions, all of them incompatible with each other.
20.1. Expected Outcome / Next Action In this book, I have focused on a fairly basic but productive way of working, for which you don’t need to install extra software or program VBA macros. This is the exact same approach that I have used myself for over two years now. In my Next Actions list, I specify my tasks this way: Expected Outcome, Slash (/), and Next Action. My current projects line up with my Expected Outcomes. That’s it. No more administration to take care of.
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20.2. A Project field for each Next Action If you want to take this to the next level, you could add a Project column to your Next Actions list. I already described how to do this in paragraph 14.5. If you also add a Project column to your Someday/Maybe list, you can easily move items between Next Actions and Someday/Maybe, while still being able to see the Project it belongs to.
20.3. Defining Projects in a Contacts folder and linking items Outlook can link items of any type to a Contact item. We can take advantage of this functionality by masquerading a Project as a Contact. 1. Create a New Projects Folder, but specify Contact Items as the type for the new folder. 2. Create a Shortcut to your new Projects Folder in the Shortcuts Pane (Ctrl+7). 3. Add a few projects to your new Projects Folder. Use the Full Name for specifying the name of the project and leave the other fields empty. 4.
OUTLOOK 2007
Switch on Contact Linking on all Forms. Via
the main menu select Tools | Options to open the Options dialog. Press the Contact Options… button on the Preferences tab to display the Contact Options dialog. Check the Show Contact Linking on all Forms item and
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Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them set the Default File As order to First Last, otherwise Outlook will mangle your project names.
Press the OK button to close the Contact Options dialog. Press the OK button to close the Options dialog. 5. Open an item, like a task item in the Next Actions (Tasks) folder by selecting it and pressing the Enter key on your keyboard. 6. Press the Contacts… button in the lower left corner of the window to display the Select Contacts dialog. 7. Type the “P“ on your keyboard to select the Projects folder, then use the Tab key on your keyboard to move to the bottom half of the dialog and start typing the name of your project to select it.
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8. Press the Enter key on your keyboard to activate the OK button. The project will now be listed at the bottom of the Task Item window:
9. Press Alt+S to save and close the Task item or press Ctrl+S to save but not close the Task item.
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Different Ways To Track Your Projects And The Actions Associated With Them 10. After saving the task item, you can double-click the underlined project name (“Computer Delivered”) to open the Project Item. 11. Click the Activities button (or press ALT, H, AZ) to display a list of all items that are linked to this project. 12. If you want to setup your project list this way, you could also add the Contacts field to your view in the Next Actions List. This would automatically show you which Project the Next Action is linked to. WARNING
— It seems that Outlook doesn’t update the
Activities list in the Project as often as I’d expect it to. That means sometimes I do not see tasks in the list even while these tasks were indeed linked to that Project! You can create a custom form for this folder and modify the fields in the view to make all of this less like you’re dealing with a real contact and more with a project. Any intermediate book on Outlook will tell you how to create a custom form, while chapter 14 in this book explains how to create a view that suits your needs.
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Working With a Smartphone
21. Working With a Smartphone Smartphone 21.1. Take multiple folders with you Most Smartphones cannot synchronize multiple Outlook task lists. You’re stuck with the default Tasks folder, which is in itself a good reason to choose that folder to store your Next Actions. If you do want to sync multiple task folders, you may want to look at the KeySuite software from Chapura (www.chapura.com). Unfortunately, it is available for the Palm operating system only. I use KeySuite on my Palm Centro. Chapura also has a solution for Windows Mobile based Smartphones, called PocketMirror for Windows Mobile. This software collapses multiple Outlook Task lists into the default Task list when synchronizing with your Smartphone. The different task lists are then represented with categories on your phone.
21.2. Create an Ideas (Stuff) task folder This may be a good idea for anyone using Outlook, but it makes a lot of sense if you use a Smartphone to capture ideas. Create separate Ideas folder of type Task Items in Outlook. Use that folder to store any new idea, appointment, promise or other stuff that you want to capture in your trusted system. As
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I wrote before, it is much easier to add items to a Task Items folder than it is to add items to your own e-mail inbox. Because you use this Ideas folder as an extra inbox, you will have to empty it regularly and process the items in it – exactly like you process the e-mails in your inbox. The same shortcut keys and sequences apply here. This makes it tremendously easy to capture stuff, without having to make a decision at the same time. My default Task folder on my Treo is this Ideas folder. That way I can press one button on my Treo and start adding stuff to it. As soon as I sync my Treo with my Outlook, they are available for further processing in the Ideas folder. Most of the time this is much easier for me than writing stuff down and having to re-type it again later. In Outlook itself, the Ideas folder is great if you use it in combination with Fingertips (www.getfingertips.com) to quickly add ideas to the folder.
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Deadlines and Your Calendar
22. Deadlines and Your Calendar I’m often asked how I track deadlines, so let me explain. In my view, a deadline is a date-specific item, which has to end up on my Calendar. So I’ll put my deadlines on the Calendar (Ctrl+Shift+A) as an All day event (Alt+V). Many times, I’d like to be reminded of that deadline a few days in advance. If the deadline requires much work that I have to do to meet that deadline, I may want to be reminded a few weeks ahead of time. So, I put another All day event on my Calendar a few days or weeks before the deadline to remind me that I’m approaching a deadline. As soon as I see that reminder on my Calendar, I’ll add an item to my Next Actions list (Ctrl+Shift+K) to start doing the work for that deadline. My Next Actions list does not contain a Due Date column. I feel that putting a Due Date in the Next Actions list does not motivate me and makes the view more cluttered than necessary, but if it works for you, feel free to leave it in the view, or to add it again.
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Using the Tadaaa List
23. Using the Tadaaa List The advantage of using a Tadaaa list is that you can see which actions you have completed during the last day, or week. If you are a knowledge worker, you could be very productive, without your realizing it, because of the daily stress and urgency. How do you use the Tadaaa list? 1. As soon as you finish an action in your task list, mark it as complete. This is necessary to set the correct value for the Date Completed field of your task item. 2. Now move the item to your XTadaaa list. If you have really named it XTadaaa and created our custom toolbar that is easy: Alt+2, X, Enter. 3. Make sure that the view of your XTadaaa list contains the Date Completed field. You can find instructions on how to do that in paragraph 14.4. 4. Group your list by the Date Completed field. Instructions on how to do that are in paragraph 14.8. You’ll now have a list with all actions that you completed, grouped by the date on which you completed them.
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After a while, you could delete the oldest items from the list by hand, or you could set the Auto Archive function to do that automatically.
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/ Sheet workflow diagram
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This scheme schem is based on the book Getting Things Done, authored by David Allen (www.davidco.com authored (www.davidco.com). ).
24. S
heet workflow diagram
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Shortcut Keys
25. Shortcut Shortcut Keys 25.1. New items
(+'+M
New e-mail
(+'+K
New task
(+'+A
New appointment
(+'+C
New contact
(+'+N
New note
25.2. Display folders
(+1
Display e-mail
(+2
Display calendar
(+3
Display contacts
(+4
Display tasks
(+5
Display notes
(+6
Display folder list
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25.3. Move around quickly
(+7
Display shortcuts
(+Y
Go to a specific folder
25.4. Use our new EachDayEmpty toolbar
%+0
Change to another view
%+1
Copy an Item to another folder
%+2
Move an Item to another folder
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Books and Other Resources
26. Books and Other Resources 26.1. Books Getting Things Done The Art of Stress-Free Productivity David Allen ISBN13: 9780142000281 Implementing David Allen’s Workflow Processing using Microsoft Outlook A paper from the David Allen Company, that is available in their online shop at http://www.davidco.com Take Back Your Life! Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to get organized and stay organized Sally McGhee and John Wittry ISBN13: 9780735623439 Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook: The Eight Best Practices of Task and E-Mail Management Michael Linenberger ISBN13: 9780974930411 Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 Step by Step Joan Preppernau and Joyce Cox ISBN13: 9780735623002
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Microsoft Outlook 2007 Bible Peter G. Aitken ISBN13: 9780470046456
26.2. Outlook add-ins There are many add-ins available for Outlook. For this book, I decided to describe a way of implementing Getting Things Done in Outlook without the use of any add-in. This has the advantage that you don’t need extra privileges from your system administrator to install anything. In many large corporations, that is just not feasible. Also, the approach that I describe in this book works in any language version of Outlook, as long as you are able to translate the menu items and instructions yourself. Most of the shortcut keys however will work in all language versions of Outlook. However, if you work with the English language version of Outlook and would like some extra help from an add-in, there is one of them that I recommend you check out.
NetCentrics Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In® NetCentrics has developed an Outlook add-in to facilitate the use of Getting Things Done in Outlook. Right now they have released a version that supports both Outlook 2003 and Outlook 2007 on Windows 2000, XP or Vista. This add-in is competitively priced, but it is only compatible with English installations of Outlook. http://gtdsupport.netcentrics.com/buy/
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Books and Other Resources
26.3. Fingertips Fingertips is not an add-in, add in, but a small utility that is designed to quickly add information information to Outlook without having to open Outlook itself. That is great for adding items to your Waiting For or Next Actions list. It can also display specific Outlook folders, start up applications and open often used documents.
At the time of writing, you can download a free version from http://www.getfingertips.com
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I hope that you enjoyed this book. moreeffect offers excellent discounts on this book when ordered in quantity for bulk purchases or special sales. For more information please contact: [email protected] phone +31-343-421381 Feel free to take advantage of our other services, or visit my weblog with more Outlook tips at www.eachdayempty.com
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