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Tenets of task management

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Before delving into Outlook 12’s task management system, I want to describe my three tenets: reduce your To-Do lists to one; keep your personal and business tasks together in one place; and get your tasks out of your head. (These are not to unique to me, but come from nearly all of the task management strategies that were studied as part of creating Outlook 12's time and task management system.)

 

1. Reduce your To-Do lists to one (as best you can.)

 

First off, reduce the number of places you store tasks. Most people “receive” tasks and keep tasks in a multitude of places, including: e-mail, snail mail, hallway conversations, phone, meetings, your spouse, on your refrigerator, and the list goes on. The worst part is that many of us try to keep our list of things to do in our heads, and that is really no good.

Since I use Outlook 12, I keep everything in the To-Do Bar in Outlook and I use a SmartPhone with Oxios To-Do List to view my tasks when I am away from my desk. I find that this system works better than scraps of paper that can’t be up to date, can’t be rearranged, and are easily lost.

Here is how I get all of my tasks into Outlook. When I am in a meeting, I use OneNote to take notes, and I use the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-K (works in Outlook too) to make tasks out of my Action Items - and now with OneNote 12, I can also flag my notes with the same result. When I am driving in the car, and something I need to do pops into my head, I follow Sally McGhee’s approach and I make a voice memo on my cell phone. When I get a chance, I transcribe my recordings into the task list on my phone or into my To-Do Bar. When I am in my office, I either type directly into the To-Do Bar or I hit Ctrl-Shift-K and enter the task into Outlook. Snail Mail? I turn them into tasks. Oh, and e-mail, well I flag it in Outlook of course!

 

2. If you can, keep your personal and business tasks together in one place.

 

Often I am sitting at work and I remember something I need to get at the grocery store, and just as often, I am at home when I remember something I have to tell my boss. By keeping one list of all of my tasks in one place, I know that I will always have my grocery list (currently the task is titled: Store) with me at the grocery and my list of topics for my boss in my weekly meeting with her. For me, trying to keep business and personal life separate is too much work, and it breaks rule number 1 – one list. Keeping one list that has both my work and my personal tasks helps me to keep a better work-life balance by forcing me to be more realistic with my time. This doesn’t mean that I don’t distinguish between personal and work tasks – I use categories to accomplish this.

 

3. Get it out of your head!

 

Keeping tasks in your head doesn’t work!! It is really liberating to depend on Outlook instead of your overtaxed brain for keeping track of your tasks. You can stop spending brain power thinking to yourself “Ok, remember to get Aluminum Foil at the grocery store, Aluminum Foil…” and instead you can focus on the activity at hand. And if you must, write down your tasks on a piece of paper, but copy into Outlook later: when you wake up in the middle of the night, with a burning idea in your head, write it down on a piece of paper and then copy it into Outlook in the morning, but don’t keep it in your head!

 

No scraps of paper to-do lists. No keeping lists in your head. Keep it all in one place – Outlook!

 

-Melissa

Comments

  • Anonymous
    December 05, 2005
    Hi Melissa -- Great to see a blog about Outlook 12, particularly about the tasks part of the application.

    I've tried to use the Tasks after every version of Outlook came out, starting with the first version (and Schedule+ before that) and then every version after. Every time I try it seems like there's not enough meat in the feature to fully manage my extensive list of projects and tasks, both personal and professional. In fact, in all my years of working in the software industry I've never met anyone who actually uses Tasks -- they use email (mostly) and the calendar (barely) and hardly know that tasks exist (let alone notes or journal). I've read Jensen Harris talking about the Customer Experience Improvement Program (I've participated since it came out) and I think it would be really interesting to learn how often the tasks and the other parts of Outlook are actually utilized in comparison to email. (Not sure if you can say, but it would be interesting...)

    I'm most curious to see what changes will be in Outlook this release that will help someone in an enterprise environment like me, who have to manage projects and long lists of tasks. In fact, with the creative work I do outside of my "real" job, my personal project/task list is even longer than my professional one.

    The changes in Outlook 12 that I have seen so far, such as putting tasks on the calendar and on a To Do pane, make tasks more visible -- but will they make tasks more manageable? The Taskpad has been available for a really long time in the Calendar, so I feel like I've tried that route before. I've even tried MS Project, but I have lots of small projects versus the really big projects that MS Project is suited for.

    I'm really hoping to see some enterprise-level examples of how tasks can really work to help busy (overloaded) people manage their tasks and projects effectively. My task list is way longer and more complex than what will fit on the calendar or the To Do pane (or the TaskPad). And my tasks aren't generally grouped by date or even due date. One of the hardest things conceptually to fitting my list into Outlook is that the "project" has a due date, and the individual tasks are undated grouped within the project -- this has always been a challenge for me when trying to use the tasks in Outlook.

    So what I'm hoping for is that tasks will become more project-centric, with the ability to use several levels of categorization. I've tried using categories before, but since categories exist only at a single level, it makes it tough to categorize effectively -- especially when I put personal and professional projects on the same list.

    So anyway I'm looking to give Outlook another chance to manage my projects and tasks. Looking forward to hearing from you.
  • Anonymous
    December 09, 2005
    I have been using Outlook since it's inception and I find the real challenge is not using tasks, journal, email, calendar, etc., to keep me organized, but rather to have associates, clients, subordinates and consultants buy into such features as assigning tasks, central document management in programs like SharePoint, using icalendars and the like.

    In a successful business environment, the key to time management is process and communication, which is only effective if the entire team is using the same principles in the same manner.

    The task management features in Outlook 97 - 2003 were in fact very successful because of there simplicity. Having used Outlook 12 for about a month now in a full production environment, I find that several of the enhancements in fact complicate its use becuase of the various options available.

    What is really required is a case study or training programmodel, that can be delivered on an industry specific basis.

    If you are looking ideas for future versions, a universal timer feature with a cumulative logging ability would be particularly useful. The timer should work based upon the active status of the window, regardless of the Outlook feature or even better, application, Outlook, Excel, Project, SharePoint, Word, etc., and correlate based upon an item ID number. The timer system would have the ability to allow for multiple items to be open with the individual item timers recording based on the active window setting.

    One additional feature that would be of great value is a task affiliation or attachment dropdown list so that multiple attachments could be added to a single drop down list rather than having to copy them into the body of hte task. The dropdown list would only contain pointers(shortcuts) so that modifications to a file during the life of the task would maintain the versioning intregrity where multiple users access the same file. This is part of what SharePoint is designed to do, but there is no easy way to link a file on a SharePoint sever to a Outlook Task, and than access that file multiple times through a single task without major clutter. The Task should have a separate tab for recrding task activities, a access log to show who has worked on the tasks and a item ID reference for searchable pruposes.

    I have some other wishes, but imust go now. I try to come back in a couple of days or so!

  • Anonymous
    February 24, 2006
    There's a task feature that I think is desperately needed and that's a follow-up with the contact on the task.  I'm a literary agent and I make submissions to editors.  I put an editor's name in the Contact field.  Each submission is a separate task.  If I have a book on submission with ten editors, I want to be able to highlight those ten submission tasks and "send a follow-up to contact" that says, what's happening with this submission?

    I also need to be able to do in-cell editing on the Contacts field in Tasks.

    Thank you.
  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2006
    I need to know if there is a feature anywhere in outlook that would allow me to restrict the due date of an assigned task.
  • Anonymous
    May 31, 2006
    The comment has been removed