As much as I love Priacta’s Total, Relaxed Organization and their TROG Bar utility, I hate how much memory Outlook takes up. I decided to do some hunting for a replacement Personal Information Manager that meets the TRO requirements and has a much smaller memory footprint. After giving Essential PIM Pro and WinPIM a try, I settled on WinPIM. Here’s why.
But first, the bad news
Using the GTD Add-In for Microsoft Outlook enables me to manage my projects quickly and easily, keeping everything in a single trusted system. But when it comes to managing Actions and avoiding being overwhelmed by too many tasks, there are some tweaks that need to be added.
Using pure GTD, only a single Next Action is recorded for a given project. With Outlook, it’s often easier to go ahead and enter all of the Actions required to move the project forward, especially when it comes to development projects. So, how do I keep my Next Actions list as short as possible, showing only the single Next Action for each project? The answer lies in utilizing the Status field. By default, any task created in Outlook has a status of “Not Started” but by setting the status to “In Progress” for only the Next Action, we can create a filtered list that is clean and more in line with GTD.
If you’re a fan of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD), then you know the top critical success factor is to have a trusted system for everything. Over the years, I’ve tried just about every combination of system you can imagine, from paper to pda to computer to online. Nothing ever had all the features necessary to make it my single trusted system. I finally settled on Outlook using the GTD Outlook Add-In from NetCentrics.
One troublesome aspect of my life as a solo developer involves record keeping. I have to be able to easily capture the time I’m spending on client work with enough detail to properly justify an invoice or time sheet. In order to keep everything together, I use Outlook’s Journal feature to create time records for later invoicing or reporting. However, getting this information into a usable report format is not something Outlook does easily. In order to get the reports I need, I had to create a macro that accepts certain criteria and creates a new Journal item containing the report I need as the body of the item. I can then copy/paste this information into Invoice detail lines or a status report email.
