ThinkingRock Forum

Hello-

I've been toying with TR on and off for a few months, and I love the way it follows GTD. I REALLY want to use it. The only thing that is holding me back is Outlook.

I have to use it, as it is the company email system. I don't use it for tasks, and I can live with an Outlook meeting calendar and a TR action calendar, and I will try the iCal link someone posted to see it I can merge the two, but if not I can live with that.

But most of my work is generated out of email. Some of it is quick, two minute actions, but quite a lot is bigger tasks and project spawning actions.

I'm not necessarily looking for a technical solution (although long term that would be fantastic), I would really appreciate some advice (tips/hints) from other TR/Outlook users on how they manage the two.

If I can figure that out, I will make the final leap.

Thanks

Welcome DucatiChic

Right now there is no way to really link actions and emails with any program. As for quickly making thoughts for collection from your email, you may be interested in this topic http://www.thinkingrock.com.au/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1286 which is for a program and script which lets you easily add thoughts quickly. If you have the thought description copied to the clipboard before you press the key combination it even pastes the text into the description for you. It might help.

I too use Outlook but I just hit my key combo whenever I need to add a thought. If I needed to reference that specific email, perhaps I would make a note of the sender and date for easier lookup in outlook. Important ones you could even copy the email's message into the notes field.

I understand the hotkey, but how do you manage your emails in Outlook? Is there a process that you use, so that it works with TR?

I have some ideas of how it can be done, but I'm interested in knowing how other people do it.

Cheers

Ohhhh I'm sorry I misunderstood. I guess my process, if you could even call it that, for Outlook is rather simplistic.

- I do not delete anything that isn't spam.

- I flag emails which I need to reference or reply to, for easier searching. Sometimes I don't end up making a next action to reply to the email though, which to me signifies that I am ok with letting that go if I happen to forget. Important ones I would either handle right away or make a next action for.

Currently I don't bother with multiple flag colors. Perhaps you could use a certain flag color to signify that they need to be considered as part of your GTD inbox that way you can filter and just see those. Or you could have a flag color for 'needs to be processed via GTD', another for 'informational item', another for 'delegated'? Hmm maybe I will consider this for myself!

- That's pretty much it. I just feel weird having a list of less than two items

My way of handling Outlook items is even simpler -- if I get an email that requires more than two minutes to handle, I create a task for it in TR, copy the pertinent bits of the email into the task, and then toss the email into my archive folder.

I don't bother with flagging it for follow-up; reminding me to deal with the email is TR's job.

Good point! Perhaps I should break myself of the habit of not fully processing my mail items one at a time. I'll give it a try.

So you seriously keep an empty inbox? I mean, that makes total sense in line with GTD.. I've just.. never seen an empty email inbox!

Honest and true.

Part of my review is processing my email inbox, and I'm not finished until the inbox is empty. When I'm done, all emails are either deleted or in my archive, and anything that takes longer than a few minutes to process goes into TR.

The mail piles up between reviews, of course. During the week I check my mail and deal with anything "hot", but most of the rest of it just sits there until my next review, when I empty it again.

It's very satisfying to look at my inbox and see a great white expanse where my emails used to be.

The only time I seem to get my inbox to zero is immediatly after holidays. My out of office reads
"I will be away until X. Due to the volume ofemails received, your email will not be forwarded, or read upon my return."

Seems to work to get it to 0

If you have to work with Outlook, you might be interested in:

http://www.jello-dashboard.net

_________________
David

Greetings from sunny South Africa Wow! What a SUPER development (TR) but now more decisions...

WARNING - LONG(ish) muttering....

Briefly the concept of GTD is (to me) VERY logical and after reading a scientific paper on the subject (about a year after reading the book) decided I MUST implement "GTD" so that my brain does not suffer a complete meltdown.... Question is HOW? I have reviewed DOZENS of applications, systems and many other related "how to's" and am now sitting at the fork in the road that says TR or Outlook + Jello OR another option as yet unknown.

If ANY reader can PLEASE pass on THEIR words of wisdom, experience, guidance or advice I would be VERY appreciative!

As part of the 'input' to this challange I can provide the following:

Work for myself so no forced use of any particular application / tool / system.
Vast majority of my 'drivers' are via eMail to which I then react i.e. No co workers or 'boss' to give direction. I'm IT (tea boy [I drink LOTS of that <smile>] and EVERYTHING else that is required to make business (but I do know not ideal but also will NEVER employ ANYONE again but that is ANOTHER story altogether...)
For years have tried to use the 'de facto standard' of MS but am quite miff at the investment ($$$ andf TIME) made + frustrations of 'conforming' to Redmond idea's...
Mobile 'tools' include iPAQ + cellular phone and when required notebook. Have tried MANY times to rely on paper and pencil but ALWAYS the pile grows and grows and I AGAIN spend more time looking for 'stuff' than I should be! Even LOOSE IMPORTANT STUFF like INVOICES and as a result INCOME! Arggggggggggggg
Have tried the 'hipster' approach (various size of card from 'mini' to A4) but eventually fails due to inability to automatically synchronise between physical (paper based diary / notes / whatever) and the electronic (eMail and related attachments - processes e.g. orders placed or accounting).
Have been using Mozilla applications for many years with good success EXCEPT now trying to sync calendar / contacts with phone and PDA and although a 'sort of solution' working (Birdiesync) is far from perfect.

Hence the re consideration of Outlook as this SEAMLESSLY sync's with both iPAQ and phone with desk PC - volia! But just as about to get into learning the Jello approach for working the GTD way I find TR and hence the opening WOW! Have searched the forum and closest I can find to being relevant is the posting by DSM over a year ago so based on the VERY INFORMATIVE posts made by existing users / contributors of TR thought I could do no better than to ask (or is that delegate? <grin>) for the input from those who have or are walking a similar path.

Apologies in advance if my rambling seems incoherent or irrelevant or that it is me just being 'dumb' but whatever feedback I can obtain will be MOST APPRECIATED! Many thanks in advance. best regards from Nigel R P.S.. KEEP SMILING

Hmmm. That must be a crowded fork in the road...

I'm still trying to decide which fork in the road to take:

1. Pure Outlook -- Advantage is that it syncs with pretty much everything and it has all the tools that you would want. Disadvantage is that it comes from Microsoft...

1a. Make a Contact folder called "Projects". Use Categories as contexts and broad concepts. Since anything in Outlook can have a contact and/or a category attached to it, you can easily manage the items in your projects. Then report on a project by looking at the Activities tab in the Project (ie. Contact) page. Disadvantage is that this is complex to setup and requires a lot of steps to do mundane things -- it cries out for an addon to make it easier.

1b. Jello is expanding rapidly and has a lot of features. I just wish it used the concept from 1a of Project/Contact folders.

2. ThinkingRock -- Advantage is that it is Java and so should work on most platforms. You just need to find an interesting way of taking the data with you to each platform (ie. USB sticks). Once the reporting capability comes up to steam, this will probably be easier than the Outlook alternative.

3. MonkeyGTD -- Advantage is that it is a JavaScript TiddlyWiki, so it should run on any Firefox browser with no server required. This is another application you can throw on a USB stick. Since this is a TiddlyWiki on Firefox, you have all the power of Firefox to use.

4. GTDInbox -- What Jello is to Outlook, GTDInbox is to GMail. This has problems from time to time because GMail changes it's interface. However, this is a nice tool when used with...

5. Jott -- Not a GTD tool. It's just a way of getting information into your GTD tool. Jott will transcribe a phone call and send it as email. If your out in the car and have a sudden thought that you want to get into your GTD system, call Jott, tell it your thought, tell it to send the thought to your email address, then process the thought as usual when you next read your email. I think they've added an IPhone interface as well.

So many tools... So little time...

How do you "get things done" if you can't decide on how to "get things done"?

_________________
David

I've been using TR for a month or so. I set up a dedicated gmail address that does nothing but collect things I want to process in TR. If I have an e-mail in Outlook, or my personal gmail, or my BlackBerry mail, or anywhere else, I just forward it to that address and process it next time I have TR up and running. TR is, of course, set up to scrape that gmail account at startup and every 10 minutes thereafter.

Today I have been the Google and saw there - repairing outllok ost files,this tool was interesting me and I downloaded it from the soft forum. I was surprised reason of the program decided my old problems with corrupted emails for minutes and without payment as I bore in mind. I have been using it for some hours,but it already likes me.