Email, Task and Time Management with PIFEM - Ian Palangio's Business Productivity. Well, for my first blog post I'd better cover PIFEM - which is an email management system that Angus Logan, Johann Kruse and I have been using with Outlook 2007.
It is loosely based on Getting Things Done (GTD) and the 4 D's of email processing. Angus and Johann have blogged about it in the past here and here and here. PIFEM uses the out of the box Outlook 2007 features of flagging and categories to manage emails that you don't want to action/complete immediately.
Once you date/time flag an item it is no longer clogging up your brain with secondary thoughts. If you manage it well... you can eliminate a lot of distractions from email, and focus on your highest priority items with laser focus. In the end, no matter how good you think you are - you can only work on one single thing at any one time. I personally find this method very useful after travelling for a few days and am behind on email. If you don't have OneNote you can download a free trial.
A Blog by Michael Wheatfill on Microsoft Technologies and Productivity. By Michael Wheatfill Table of Contents: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 Hey GTD’ers.
There are several blogs out there that describe how to utilize Outlook and OneNote to implement the Getting Things Done methodology. The most popular of the bunch is a collection of posts over at 7Breaths that covers OneNote 2007 and briefs on it’s integration with Outlook 2007. The release of Office 2010 brings quite a few neat features that can be used to make you more productive and organized if you currently use Outlook and OneNote or if you are just starting out with Getting Things Done. This blog post will give a brief overview of my system, which pulls many ideas from the the 7Breaths implementation, and adds my own twists and ideas for making my system work for me. I use Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 as the main tools for managing my GTD system.
Keep in mind my system is not entirely electronic. Outlook 2010 Outlook is essentially used for the following workflows in the my GTD system: Jello Dashboard. 43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero. These are posts from a special 43 Folders series looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way.
You can visit each of the posts by clicking the title. And don’t miss the “Related Articles” for our all-time popular posts on productively dealing with email. Looking for the Inbox Zero video? The full 1-hour video for Merlin’s Inbox Zero presentation at Google is available for free down here — or check out this post about the video and slideshow. Posts in the Inbox Zero series 43F Series: Inbox Zero [Introduction] - “Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.”Inbox Zero: Articles of faith - “When I first suggested the email DMZ and said there was a way to get your inbox to zero in 20 minutes, I wasn’t lying.
Related articles. GTD in Outlook. I’ve been experimenting with David Allen’s GTD (as well as other productivity methodologies) for a while now and have settled on an implementation that works rather well for email.
In this post, I’d like to give you the process I follow to organize my email life and code for an Outlook macro that automates many aspects of the process. Simply stated, GTD is a method for keeping track of your life. Since many of us live in a world where email is constantly piling up, a method for managing email and the tasks associated with those emails are imperative. I’ve read David Allen’s book several times and I like many of the ideas, but find I need a simpler method for tracking everything. Below, I will outline the various steps of the modified GTD process I use on a daily basis. Quick Rundown (for the impatient) For those that would like the quick and dirty overview of this method, here it goes (a full tutorial follows). Each step is explained in detail with screenshots below.
Inbox Triage Sub Task()