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.

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.