Managing GTD Projects in Outlook
Managing GTD Projects in Outlook
These pages are a quick illustration of how to use the built-in capabilities of Outlook to manage your GTD Project List and associated items.
This method is based on treating a Project as if it were an Outlook Contact item. As a result, you can link all of your associated tasks, contacts, notes, journal entries, documents and any other “objects” to your project, and view them from an Activities Tab, just as you would with a “person” contact. You can maintain a simple list of projects and “drill down” through the Outlook forms to any level of detail desired. You can display your Next Actions on any task list or your calendar. You will have a complete history of your project at any time, and can archive that history if necessary. You can employ the full sorting, filtering and viewing capability of Outlook on any of your project data.
I like this approach and learnt some things about outlook along the way. However, I would say for me it is too complicated way to manage the projects. I have been using mindmanager to map out my projects and then sweep the todos to outlook. There are some limitations to this and I am still working it through but it seems to use the power of mindmanager which is the visual aspect and the power of outlook which is the simple lists and the ability to synch with my treo.
I have tried resultsmanager but at this stage I think it is overkill for me. It requires a great deal of effort to keep it humming along but I believe that the company is working on that issue for the next release.So, I will check it out then.
July 28th, 2005 at 11:05 am
HI there,
Given that doing personal project management in Outlook is like gluing wings on a fish hoping it can fly, please try the GTD-friendly application I’ve written and sell: MasterList Professional.
If you like it, let me know and I will give you a free license. If you don’t, I’d really appreciate your feedback.