I recently had the David Allen company come to Microsoft to present their two-day seminar on Getting Things Done: Managing Workflow, Projects, and Priorities. I spent some time a couple of years ago trying out this method based on the book and the Outlook add-on from Netcentrics. My implementation failed for a number of reasons. One of them, I think, was that the tools in Outlook (even with the pretty good add-in) just didn’t work well enough for me. Some of these limitations of Outlook have now been removed and the seminar was a catalyst for me to try a new implementation – this time using Outlook 2007’s new capabilities. From my perspective, the most important new capability in Outlook 2007 is the ability to have a blended treatment of tasks and mail – the two primary sources of action (for me, at least). And from this basic capability, I’ve built my implementation.

A number of my colleagues at work (as well as the folks from David Allen) were interested in how I pulled off what I did in Outlook and so I figured I’d go ahead and bite the bullet and write it up. This blog entry is the first entry in a series in which I’ll describe how I’ve done this.

The posts are as follows:

• Part 1 - BASICS: Navigation, Key New Outlook Capabilities [this post]
• Part 2 - WORKFLOW: The GTD basic workflow, my adaptation in Outlook
• Part 3 - IMPLEMENTATION: How to configure all of this in Outlook 2007

The Basics

Before I move on to the next few posts describing how  I have configured Outlook to match how I'm using GTD, let me describe just a couple of key Outlook capabilities that make this all possible:

• Easy and Quick Navigation - For me, it all starts with having a simple and clear launching pad from which to dig in to the various activities I need to use to manage action using Outlook.  This breaks down into a set of folders across various types (email, tasks, calendar, etc.)  While I really like many of the things about the new Outlook UI, for keeping myself focused on the right GTD workflow, I find that I need to get rid of many of those choices.  In particular, the ability to easily get at my whole, unfiltered Inbox is actually a big problem.  Checking what's in the inbox is so ingrained that I've removed it from anything I have easy access to.  Instead, I use a filtered list (called "IN-INCOMING" built with a search folder -- see Part 3) that only shows me mail about which I haven't yet decided if I need to take action.  I take a shortcut to this folder and all the other regularly important folders and put them onto the Shortcuts area in Outlook:

             

• To-Do: Tasks + Flagged Mail - Outlook 2007 provides a new "virtual folder" called To-Do that will show all Tasks and all Flagged Mail together in one combined list.  This is great and is the basis for my GTD implementation.

• Search Folders - Normally when you look at a folder, you see all the items in it.  When I look at my Sent Items folder, I see all the mail in Sent Items.  When I look at my Inbox I see everything in my Inbox.  You've probably noticed that you can create Views on folders that combine filtering, sorting, etc.  This lets you, for example, create a view for "all flagged mail that is older than a week" or "all mail to me."  I find views OK, but Search Folders are better.  With a Search Folder, you can create a new "virtual" folder that has a set of filter criteria defined and it'll look like a folder with only items that match a certain set of criteria.  And the results can be pulled from across many folders (e.g., "all flagged items in my Inbox, Sent Items or File folder").

• Views - OK, I know I said I prefer Search Folders.  Unfortunately, with Outlook you can only have search folders that search for mail items.  Because the foundation of my approach takes advantage of the blended treatment of tasks and flagged mail, I can't use Search Folders all the time.  In particular, to build filtered ways to look at the To-Do list, I need to use vanilla views.  

• Complex Filter Criteria - When defining filters for a view or for a search folder, you have probably used the UI that lets you specify various things like when something is due, whether it's flagged, what the categories are, etc.  However, if you look closely on this dialog, you'll notice that there's a SQL tab.  On this tab you can define very, very advanced queries that let you build more complex filters that are possible on the rest of the tabs.  In some of my implementation of GTD, I've had to build some pretty complex queries.  The good news is that I've figured them out and I'll just provide you the text to paste into the SQL field.

• Custom Toolbars - I like to have quick and easy access with one or two clicks to the actions I use when I'm trying to deal with all of my email and tasks.  So I've created a custom toolbar and put certain buttons right on that toolbar for easy access.  On my toolbar, I have (from left to right): the categories button, the Flag (Custom) button [with a slightly customized icon], a quick drop-down to show the views available for the current folder (I only use this for the To-Do list) and the Move To button to quickly move items to a folder when I'm organizing and filing things away.

Those are the building blocks.  In the next post, I'll describe the basic workflow for Getting Things Done and how I experience Outlook when I use it for this workflow.  In the posts after that, I'll describe how to configure all of this in Outlook.