eMarkLee

Many of you out there do not sit in front of the computer all day and hence this blog post may not be as relevant…and stop rubbing it in. For the rest of us, we have to use Microsoft Outlook all day in between reading Fantasy Football articles on ESPN. Life sucks….but so does Chad Ocho Cinco.

Disclaimer: I’m still using the older version of Outlook 2003, not 2007. Most of these principles transcend versions, but some may already have been addressed with 2007.

1. Use filters to weed out shit emails. Any email sent to a DL you should probably filter and put into a sub-folder within “@REVIEW” or “@ARCHIVE”. Some of these you want to read eventually, some of them only if stars align and you are given a month of free time at work and also a personal massage every morning by a Swedish masseusse. I am surprised at how many people don’t use filters. I have literally hit the limit on the number of filters I can write, including “OOO messages”, automated reports, and my weekly Thursday massage session reminder.

2. Turn off that annoying alert at the right bottom corner of the screen. It’s too distracting to have email alerts pop up every fe w minutes. Besides, that’s where sports updates are supposed to go. How dare they.

3. Set Outlook to only send / receive periodically. I’m working with 15 minutes right now. The Send part is particularly helpful. How many times have you sent that email and the split second after realise you had just forwarded a NSFW email to a few thousand colleagues including your boss and CEO? Um, me neither.

4. Color code your emails. This helps separate out the emails sent directly to you where you are the primary person to take action on the email. You are also the primary person to ignore that email from that fat dude in HR.In Outlook 2003, you just go to: Tools | Organize.

5. Utilise Tasks as your to-do list. I have followed the GTD style “dashboard” view for Outlook that allows me a good glimpse of all my tasks and calendar at all times on a separate window. I have more details on how to set Tasks and Calendar up to make this happen.

6. Utliise hotkeys. From going to Outlook from other applications to creating tasks and meetings. Keyboard hotkeys are back like neon colours and Rick Astley, yo.

7. Don’t surf the web all day.

8. Don’t IM all day about whether the Olympics should be counted based on total golds or total medals. It’s total medals, so the US won. Sorry, great-great-great-grandparents.

9. Review the task list on Fridays.

10. Change your name to Ocho Cinco. That way nobody will email you anymore and you wouldn’t have to use Outlook.

Ok, I got a bit tired at #7 and flew through the rest, but Top 10 sounds better than Top 7.

That should mostly do it for my GSD series. I may have one more post on GSD’ing your normal life, but the Outlook/work email aspect has been the most useful to me so far. GSD!

Since I have been GSD’ing so well the past few weeks, I have neglected to blog. I have now added blogging to my list of things to do, so it has now been captured. Done.

The first thing I think anybody should do when implementing GSD is looking at emails. For every email that comes in, you should decide on what the next action is and file accordingly (I make action items into Outlook Tasks). I generally keep my Inbox empty at the end of the day, save for a couple of important emails that I want to bang out. Any email that you can respond to in 2 mins or less, just do it (JDI). Your decision should be: Do it, Defer it, Delegate it, or Delete It.

1. Create three folders, @ARCHIVE, @REVIEW, @ACTION, and @WAITING. The “@” sign puts these folders at the top.
2. From this point on, everything that goes into your Inbox goes into one of those folders. Let me describe in more detail here:

@ARCHIVE: Stuff you’re done with. Nothing in this list requires an action. If you need something from this bucket, just search for it.
@REVIEW: Stuff you should read. I’ve toyed with the idea of “@REVIEW_LATER” for the less important emails that you might want to read eventually but right now just have one. Nothing here is important…it’s for your viewing pleasure and when you have time.
@ACTION: I keep this folder mostly empty because I use Outlook Tasks to manage my tasks and drag emails into Tasks but I use this folder for important things for today that I will need to refer to.
@WAITING: This is pretty important. I have a separate trick that helps track emails that I will share later, but basically this is the folder to keep copies of emails that you have sent to people that eat your emails like fish & chips.

This works pretty well for work but I haven’t done it yet for personal email. We’ll see how that goes…