Projects Possible

It was pointed out to me by a reader via email that I haven’t really kept you all in the loop with my Xobni saga… So this brief post will hopefully get you all up to speed and give you some insight of what I am working through and still hope to get resolved.

Unfortunately, I still have Xobni uninstalled.  There are two primary hurdles that still present themselves which I am currently unable to get past on my primary work machine.

First, I periodically use a Satellite connection through a VPN to connect to our corporate email Exchange server.  When I operate in that environment with Xobni installed, my Outlook become unbearably slow.  What is unbearably slow… well let’s just say that I could type a complete sentence pick up the phone, look up a phone number and dial that number and when I look at the screen the sentence will not be visible in its entirety.  (In all fairness to what I consider to be a great application this slowdown does not seem to exist on my high speed (DSL) connection when connected through our VPN.)  Since I spend about 40-50% of my time in that satellite environment I can’t deal with the extreme slowness.

Second, is that I still have the issue of improper shutdown of Outlook.  This causes corruption in my mailstores which take absolutely forever to rebuild when I restart Outlook.  Things that I have tried to do to resolve this problem…

Archive messages - I have nearly 100,000 messages and I have now broken them all into separate mailstores by year to get their file sizes down.

Upgrade to Outlook 2007 - Recently I made a change to Outlook 2007 thinking perhaps there may have been an issue with 2003 an the interaction with other applications.  (I had another selfish reason - I wanted the ClearContext beta and right now it only runs on 2007)

Rebuild the mailstores with ScanPST - I have rebuilt each and every one of the mailstores (archives included) thinking that any errors that would be found and corrected may ultimately resolve the shutdown problem.

Uninstalled other Outlook applications - This would include my most favorite application of all ClearContext.  The problem doesn’t seem to be tied to addons because I had the same result.

In fairness again, you should know that I have a second machine that I use for personal mail and it does not have this Second problem.  I don’t carry this machine up to the lake house so I have no idea if it has the first.

I have been in email contact with the Xobni support department on these issues and have tried multiple things believing that there may be a solution in place.   Support for the most part is quite responsive unfortunately they just can’t seem to figure out how to resolve these two showstopper issues for me.

So the bottom line for me is to periodically install the app and see if I am able to close down Outlook without either a C Runtime error or an Outlook error indicating that things didn’t close properly.  Once I consistently get shutdown happening then I will try it on the Satellite connection.

On a side note, even though I have these two problems I would encourage you to try Xobni if you haven’t.  The search capability is absolutely incredible, and the contact information and management is what Outlook should have done!

They just entered into open (non-invite) beta so the application is available to all.  (Make sure that if you experience either of my two problems that you let their support department know about it!!!)  You can see their press release here or better yet just go to the Xboni website and download it.

In this day and age of email overload I find that I am having to contribute to the overload because individuals that I have exchange email or telephone calls with have committed to do something that invariably it gets buried in their hundreds if not thousands of email. Ultimately they forget the deadline unless I offer a gentle reminder.

I recently read an article on Itzy Sabo’s - Email Overload blog called Nagless Reminders.  The strategy that he outlines is actually great!  Rather than send a reminder of a committed deadline making you a "nag" simply reply sometime near the deadline with a "Thank You".   The key here is not replying immediately but replying near the deadline.   For example if you receive a commitment on Wednesday from someone to have something done by Monday, don’t thank them on Wednesday… thank them on Monday morning… the commitment just got pushed to the top of their list and you reminded them in a way that wasn’t "nagging".

That of course puts the responsibility on your to send the "nagless reminder".   You could simply create an outlook task to do this… chances are you already have a task in place for the item that needs to be completed anyway.  Something that I do is use ClearContext’s Defer feature.  When the commitment arrives I simply Defer it until I need to offer my nagless reminder.   This takes it out of my Inbox so I am not constantly reminded that I need to remind the person and "magically" it appears again when I told it to.  Productivity to the MAX.   I don’t forget about it and I don’t have to NAG the person I need to Thank for getting me what I need when they said they would.

I stumbled upon the Xobni (Zob-nee) website when I was looking for email productivity tools.  After reading all of the pages, watching the video (see below) and signing up for the beta I was a bit disappointed that I could not immediately begin trying out what appeared to be a great tool.  They did however offer a “priority” beta and all I had to do was put their logo on my blog.  I’m thinking that they wanted to get links back to their site to increase their search engine rankings.   I finally got my invitation a few days ago and now I have an opportunity to comment on my initial impression.

The download and installation of the Xobni application was quick and relatively seamless.  Xobni does need to perform an initial synchronization with your email and on my machine with tens of thousands of pieces of email dating back to 2003 this process took about 35-40 minutes.

Once the installation was complete,  I had a new, minimizable window attached to my Outlook that was providing me with absolutely amazing analytical data about the emailer and other “associations” that are tied to the piece of email.

For this Initial Review I will highlight just a couple features that I have been using daily if not multiple times a day.   Remember my goal was efficiency and productivity and I can honestly say that in just one week’s worth of use, Xobni delivered!!! 

1. Search - As many of you know, I use 2 Outlook Add-ins.  I use Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) specifically for it’s Search capability.  What I don’t particularly like about NEO is that it really isn’t integrated into Outlook, it is a separate application that loads on top of Outlook.  With Xobni, I now have search capability available to me ALL the TIME in the Xobni side window.  Unlike an Outlook search, the Xobni search is also lightning FAST.  Additionally, the Xobni search results are displayed in a single pane and match not only email messages, but individuals as well.  Extremely impressive to me and in the first day of my installed Xobni I probably used that feature alone at least 2 dozen times. 
2. The Xobni email tab -  There are two tax on Xobni.  On this tab you get a graphical representation of when (times of the day) you exchange email with the emailer, other people who exchange email with the emailer, conversations being held with the emailer, and files that have been exchanged with the emailer.   This tab really helps see what is going on with the person.  In my first day of use I was able to determine if I had sent specific files to individuals that I should have sent to them.  
3. The Organize Tab in Xobni is like a small dashboard of what is going for ME in Outlook.  You will see on this tab section your Upcoming Appointments, and Tasks.  There is also a section at the bottom of the tab showing people that you haven’t emailed with recently so you can “stay connected”.

I must say, in just a few minutes of my beta review, Xobni is going to be an Outlook tool that I will NOT be able to live without.  It makes my email time so much more productive, but beyond that it really helps to make it more organized.  The toolset and functionality is something that I wish that ClearContext would have thought of so that I could get it all in a single interface.   Since they didn’t, Xobni is where I am at and I hope they are successful.  I know I will be a customer!  Get signed up to download the beta here.

As a project manager, I am always looking for great tools and utilities that will help me to become more productive and improve customer (internal and external) experience.

I know about the standard stuff that we use like Microsoft Project, Mindmapper, Excel, Outlook and the like.   What I would be interested in is hearing what you’ve found that you believe to be absolutely indispensable.  For example, I have posted reviews on an Outlook addin that I use called ClearContext IMS.  This tool helps me become a much more effective and productive email manager.    I’ve also posted about Excel and some of the things that I try to do with Excel to make me more productive.

 What do you do?  What little tricks have you found that help you out as you work on projects…  Share them with us!

There are a LOT of theories and ideas floating around to help with time management and productivity.  Classes and seminars are offered, books are published, and websites and blogs are posted all to try to help us better manage our lives.  For this author there has been no one method to help with time and productivity management.   In fact before I knew about these methods I was trying to come up with things on my own that many of these methods suggest.

In today’s posting I am going to give some insight on how I manage my projects using Microsoft Outlook, ClearContext’s IMS, Nelson’s Email Organizer (NEO) and Excel.   My goal has been to try to get everything I do that is work related consolidated into a single location and while Outlook is getting pretty close, my work environment requires some additional reporting structures that keep me away from my single trusted system.

For those of you familiar with Getting Things Done (GTD) by David Allen, or Total Workday Control (TWC)by Michael Linenberger it is all about changing the way that we work.  This can be as simple as the little things like grouping like things together and working on them all at the same time to much more complex and time consuming changes like rebuilding your workspace, developing filing systems, etc.   The key for me was to latch on to an idea or two and work with them, integrate them into your life and then add more once I had mastered the ideas I was working on.

When I started managing projects I found rather quickly that the medium that people wanted to use for communication was email.  I quickly went from an email box of 20-30 pieces of significant email every day to 200-300 pieces of email every day.  Combine that with customer face time and limited access to email and I soon found I was not keeping up.  I needed a solution that could help me manage and find things much easier than I had in the past.   The solution I found at the time was Nelson Email Organizer.  This is a great tool and one that I use to this day for email searches and correspondent management right from within Outlook.  NEO It was my first attempt at managing each piece of email in my Inbox, giving it a home, and knowing and being comfortable with the fact that I was going to be able to find it again if needed.   Another KEY feature of NEO for me was the ability to search across multiple mail stores.  Remember that 2GB limit that Outlook used to have?  My solution to that was to create separate Archives and move messages into those archives.   The down side to that is the messages were no longer search-able in Outlook unless I loaded each of the archives one at a time and performed the search.  Because NEO creates its own set of indexes that are super fast, this restriction was removed and I could keep years worth of email and search through 10s of thousands of messages in a matter of seconds.

NEO and Outlook worked well for me for quite awhile but NEO didn’t help me with managing tasks and so I went on the hunt once again for web solutions for project management.  Ultimately I stumbled across GTD (Getting Things Done) and TWC (Total Workday Control).  Take a look at the graphic.  The concept with these systems is that as messages come into your inbox you need to make a decision about them.  Ask yourself if you need to do something with this email… If not you probably just need to file it away as a reference or better yet if it isn’t going to be needed just delete it. (NEO would help me with this so this was nothing new.)  The other side of the equation however is more difficult to deal with.  If I need to do something with it, what is it that needs to be done, who should do it, when should it be done, etc… all start entering into the picture.   As you can see from the graphic there really are 3 choices… I do it now, I delegate it to someone else, or I hold onto it until a future date.  It was something that hit me as being so simple yet almost unbearable to manage.  That is where ClearContext’s IMS product entered the picture for me.  With IMS not only are the non-actionable items manageable but the actionable items become manageable as well and all linked to the appropriate projects and people.  I downloaded it, installed it and I’ve never looked back.  Keep in mind that I don’t claim to be a GTD or TWC guru and I don’t do all of the things that I’m supposed to do nor will I probably ever do them all.  I don’t even use all of the functionality that exists within ClearContext’s IMS product (yet).  That isn’t the point.  The point is I use what works for me and as I fine tune my process I may also find I use more of their concepts or in the case of the software their tools. 

The last tool that I have started using pretty extensively is Excel.  I find that I can use it to keep track of a lot of information in an organized form and have at my fingertips information about each project that I use on a day to day basis.  With Excel I am able to streamline common project tasks information on the items that are repeated for each project that I work on.  The members at Excelforum  have really helped me in this end goal by helping me to create scripts that help me keep track of tasks that are completed, scripts that help me to create new task spreadsheets with limited numbers of key-presses, and most recently with a script that helps me to create Outlook tasks for each and every item  of a project that I need to be tracking.

While my methods are not perfect… the goal is and has always been to increase my productivity and reducing the amount of work that I have to perform.   I’m always looking for great new ideas so if you have any to share please do so.   In the next few weeks I hope to share with you some of the scripts that I use in my Excel workbook.  I also encourage you to read my reviews on ClearContext or better yet go to their website and download the application and give it a try.

The ClearContext IMS (Information Management System) v4 Outlook Add-in has been released.  This new release adds some great features and functionality.  Included below are the ones that I have tested and use.  I have also done a prior review on overall features and functions that I use that you can find here.   With IMS I have found the best way to find out about it is to use it.  You can get a 30 day trial here…

So let’s jump in…

My FAVORITE feature of IMS4 - The Dashboard.   Similar to what you might see in your Outlook Today the Dashboard can be reached by clicking on the Dashboard button on the toolbar or by clicking on the ClearContext IMS folder.   The dashboard will display for you a quick Status of pending flagged Messages, Appointments and Tasks/Actions.  There is also a detail area on the dashboard for each.   Messages will show you all “flagged” messages in your Inbox, or you can filter the entire dashboard for specific topics or categories that you may have assigned.   For example I could look for all items with a topic of “ProjectManagement” and a Category of “Issues” and each of the areas of the dashboard would have the filter applied.   I predominately use this in unfiltered format (the default) and focus my attention on the Tasks area as well as the Appointments.   It is a great place to go for a quick overview and planning of your day.

Probably my next favorite feature is DO NOT DISTURB.  This button will stop the Pavlovian trigger of “You’ve got mail” or whatever other popups or sounds you may have attached to the new mail notification.  I find that I when I get that notification the first thing I want to do is leave whatever I am working on and jump to my inbox to see what is there.   With this feature I can maintain my productivity by setting the amount of time that I do not want to receive notifications… Don’t worry you can still go to your inbox and send and receive or you can click it again and turn off Do Not Disturb.

ALERT is another feature that allows you to create unread message alerts.  If your Inbox is anything like mine and perhaps you are using Do Not Disturb to help keep you on task you may need some way to quickly wade through what is in your Inbox. Creating an unread message alert is the perfect tool for this.   For example, if my boss sends me an email I usually need to give it higher priority and nearly immediate attention.  ClearContext has functionality to prioritize my mail and put his messages at the top of my Inbox but now I can also have a POPUP window display that shows me I have a message in my Inbox from my boss that is at least 4 hours old (or whatever other timeframe).  You can not only do this with contacts but you can also do it with messags threads.   If someone responds to your message thread you can have an alert window display notifying you that the timeframe for action has passed and you really should be doing something about this thread.

With each release of this product I find that I am becoming more and more of a fan and my Outlook life is now so entrenched in it’s use that I couldn’t even imagine what Outlook would be like without it.  If you are at all a subscriber to Getting Things Done (GTD) or Total Workday Control (TWC) and you use Outlook to manage email, you owe it to yourself to check out ClearContext IMS in the demo below or download your free trial…

There are a couple of Outlook addin applications that I use and use quite extensively.   ClearContext is one of those applications… If you are like me and you deal with a literal ton of email every day you owe it to yourself to take a look at this addin.

If you’ve ever wanted to:

• Unsubscribe from an email thread that you were carbon copied on as an FYI and the rest of the world that was also carbon copied is responding with a Reply All
• Defer a piece of email until a later date and have it magically reappear in your InBox
• Delegate an email to someone as either an Outlook managed task or as an email with an automatic reminder for you to do a followup at a future date
• Create Tasks or Schedule Appointments for things that you need to do and have it automatically include a copy of the email for you to use as a reminder when the Task or Schedule come due on your Outlook calendar
• File messages into specific folders and not only received but sent messages
• Categorize and color code your inbox so the real important stuff filters to the top to be addressed first
• See all messages, tasks and appointments that are related to each other

ClearContext is the tool for you, and from INSIDE Outlook - ClearContext adds two new toolbars to the top of your existing outlook screens.  (I don’t use Windows Vista so I’m not sure what it does there.) 

Our coporate email is also on an Exchange Server.   ClearContext works just fine.   We also have a document retention policy that in no way is long enough for me so I use the filing features of ClearContext to also help me keep an Archive of all of my email locally so that when my corporate mail servers start purging I still have local copies.

Many of you may have seen that I just finished reading David Allen’s book called Getting Things Done.  I can say that I found ClearContext prior to finding Allen’s book and I found the things that it could do fit perfectly with how I wanted to manage my Outlook life.   I don’t know which came first GTD or ClearContext but I can see how ClearContext fits within Allen’s methods perfectly.  The point here is even if you have no intention of employing any of the GTD practices there are features in this addin that make it a great productivity enhancer and worth every penny you pay.  I use it and would never go back to an Outlook without it.

There is a free demo available for you to try at the ClearContext website.   Download it… play with it… use just a feature or two to start… by all means take the tutorials they offer… before you know it your Outlook nightmares will be diminished.