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
For years I have hosted my own email in one way or another, sometimes in my own office, on a shared hosting server, or on a dedicated hosted server. My main requirements were to have IMAP and web access so I could easily keep all email in one place and access it from anywhere. After trying Lotus Notes, Scalix, hMailServer, and a number of other open source options for Windows and Linux, I finally gave up after discovering Google Apps.
With Google Apps, I get all the power of Gmail as if it is my my own domain email server. Even though it’s Gmail, everything I send is from solodevelopersuccess.com. The free standard version includes 25 accounts with 8gb of storage each as well as Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Chat and Google Sites. I can even set Google Sites to be my primary web site, however it’s quite limited so I’m sticking with using a shared server account from A2 Hosting.
Even though I was doing well using the GTD Add In for Outlook, I was still feeling overwhelmed by all the tasks I had created. I just couldn’t seem to keep them filtered in a way that let me see only what was truly important, right now. While researching ways to handle this, I stumbled upon Priacta’s website and their Total, Relaxed Organization (TRO) training. The more I read, the more I liked what I saw, and took the plunge by purchasing their online training course. Over the next month, I implemented their system and completed their 21 day follow up exercises. TRO has one significant advantage — it can be put t use from day one by teaching not only principles, but specific step by step actions to take to quickly organize your workspace, put things off immediately and start being productive.
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.
