I recently found the blog of Melissa MacBeth, a developer on Outlook 12, the Outlook component of Microsoft's upcoming office suite. This time around, the developers actually read some of the premier time management books such as Getting Things Done and others listed in the blog. I am happy with this development, because I have become convinced that no Outlook developer has actually USED Outlook for a calendar, task list, or contact management suite. You can read Melissa's blog for the details. I am happy with the developments, and I will eagerly bug my wife for a copy when it comes out if I can't somehow score a beta copy.
Until Outlook 12 comes out, we're pretty much stuck with the older versions, be they '97 (don't tell me people still run Office '95!), 2000, XP and 2003. I believe there was an Outlook '98, but I didn't use it. Outlook works fine for email, but when it comes to the calendar and task list, Outlook is a little deficient. Over the years I have worked hard to adapt Outlook to systems such as Franklin Covey and now Getting Things Done. One component of Outlook has always been more on the useless side than any other, especially Notes: Outlook Today. I never completely understood the point to Outlook Today, although I have tried in the past to use it as an overall view of what I needed to do. You can set it to show you a list of calendar entries for up to a week, and you have some very basic task display options. It isn't very usable for GTD, which teaches that tasks should not be dated. Any activity that is date or time dependent belongs on the calendar, or the "Hard Landscape". Tasks should be, in GTD, sorted into lists of contexts, such as "@home", "@work", or whatever your particular contexts may be. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders raised the issue that GTD is designed for professionals who work in offices, have lots of appointments, and travel. It is much harder though not impossible to be adapted by computer geeks who often have only one context "@computer". I'll let you read Merlin's perspective on that, and I'm always looking for ways to do GTD more efficiently in my situation as well.
In any case, the task display on Outlook Today is useless. It is useless, that is, until now. Thanks to Flipping Heck, I now know that Outloook Today can be customized to be somewhat useful. The Outlook today page sources an html file. You can develop your own, or adapt someone else's. Check out the file available for download on Flipping Heck's website. I took that one and did some tweaking for my own use. Flipping Heck has the inbox and task list side by side in a 50/50 split. I tweaked it to my inbox and calendar in a 30/70 split. It sources the views that you normally use. I normally set my calendar to display my task list sorted by categories or "contexts", so now this is on my today screen. If I get a chance, I might run this file through Frontpage and see what else I can do with it. I am not sure if blogger allows for the uploading of files, but if you're interested in my file email me at emuelle 1 at gmail dot com. (simply format email address correctly.
To implement, right click on Outlook Today, which is the uppermost folder in the Outlook folder list. Select "Properties for...(whatever your Outlook Today folder is named on your system)" and click the "Home Page" tab. Under the address bar is a Browse button. Click that and navigate to the location of your new file. Before you do that, I need to advise you that I do not know how to change it back, but I'm sure somebody on a discussion forum or a group at Yahoo or Google will know.
I'm not sure if I'll use it, or if I'll just use separate windows for my inbox and my calendar. At work I sometimes need two windows, at home one is good enough. Happy tweaking!
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