GTD update
My inbox count is at zero as of this afternoon.
Seriously. It’s weird.
I’m not actually following GTD 100%, but more the spirit of it in a manner that fits my personal style and works with the tools i have access to. The primary need for both was something for working GTD-type work habits into my daily Outlook use.
I found a range of articles, which all seemed to involve writing macros or some other class of code, which is very much NOT for me. And the GTD Outlook Plugin from David Allen isn’t updated yet to work with Office 2007, which I am fully on now thanks to the recent RTM, so that is out.
So per a comment I made in my last post on this, I’m giving ClearContext a serious try. So serious that I just wiped out my 60+ Outlook rules (added a few back in, for discussion lists), and my entire folder hierarchy, and am rebuilding everything organically using ClearContext’s Topic tool. So far, so good, with two small peeves (below).
The most important part of this exercise is obviously getting into the proper work habits – e.g. heavy use of the “ActionView” in ClearContext, which shows me upcoming tasks and appointments. And of course, that is only useful if I actually get in the habit of acting immediately on every email that comes in – create a Task, Delegate, Schedule, or Defer it (or my favorite, Unsubscribe to the whole thread). Working on that – it’s hard, as I usually just skim emails and let them pile up with some twisted assortment of action flags on that until I get frustrated and move the whole lot to archives.
But baby steps…first step was clearing the deck, so to speak, and that’s done. Now, on to my small peeves re: ClearContext:
1. While I assign a topic to a thread or email, I want it to file immediately. As it stands now, I have to assign a topic, hit Enter, then hit File Msg (or Thread, or Topic). Is there a way to change this in the options?
2. AutoAssign has a couple issues. First, it plainly won’t work. I want to assign all mails sent to a given discussion list to a specific Topic and File Immediately. However when I select that, nothing happens. I suspect it has something to do with the way internal DL email addresses display in Outlook, e.g. thisdiscussion@microsoft.com might display as “This Discussion”. Maybe? Second, when I select AutoAssign, in the “Message is addressed to” it only includes my email address – it doesn’t pick up on the email addresses actually displayed in the selected email’s To and CC fields. AutoAssign is unusable for these reasons, and I’m back to Outlook rules again.
More updates as I continue this little adventure…
No Comments
I can set you up with my macros – I dig them – just let me know. Much lighter weight than plug ins.
Thanks for the feedback and congrats on getting more organized. Let me address your peeves with ClearContext:
1. I think you can save a keystroke or two by using the Topic Selector. Alt-P opens it (or click the Topic button), start typing your Topic name and click enter to assign or one of the shortcut keys to file. The time savings here, BTW, really comes into play after you’ve got Topics started on your threads. The next time a message in this conversation arrives it will automatically be tagged with the correct Topic, so all you need to do is hit Alt-M to file. You take this to the next level by using AutoAssign to pre-assign Topics to message threads. Which brings me to your next point.
2. In v3.0.4 we made some improvements to the way CC resolves Exchange addresses. Make sure that you have downloaded your Global Address List to take advantage of this functionality. See this post for more detail: http://blog.clearcontext.com/2006/11/exchange_name_r.html . Also, if you want to ensure that ClearContext forces Topic changes according to your instructions, check “Override existing Topic†when creating AutoAssign rules. That said, you are correct that CC doesn’t handle Exchange distribution lists like it should. This is on our issues list for some future work.
The latter issue (AutoAssign not picking up all addresses in the To and CC fields) was not one that has been brought up before. I am noting and will see if we can do something about it in a future build.
Thanks again for your comments. Please send more feedback my way as you have it.