I was listening to the folks at Manager Tools the other day. It’s one of my favorite podcasts, and they recently just launched a new audio blog that deals with smaller management issues. One I heard dealt with Microsoft Outlook’s ‘desktop alert’ feature (aka the Toast, because it resembles toast popping up in the lower right corner of your screen).

It reminded me of the three most important things you should do in Outlook if you want to be more productive. Here are my three favorite Outlook tips:

The Toast Popup

Burn the toast!
You need to set the Desktop Alert feature so it doesn’t pop up every time you receive an email. Not every email is so important that it’s worth interrupting what you’re working on. It’s sort of like a phone ringing while you’re having a one-to-one meeting with one of your direct reports. If you answer it, you’re basically telling the person you’re meeting with that you’d rather spend your time on whatever might be on the phone than with them.

If you’re a responsible manager, you’re always working on the thing that is most important at that time, so it’s really unlikely that whatever that new email says is more important that what you’re doing. Stay focused on what you’re doing, and you’ll be much better off.

To turn off the toast:

1. Go to Tools>Options, and click the “Preferences” tab.
2. Click “Email Options…” then “Advanced Email Options…”
3. Under “When new items arrive in my Inbox, uncheck the 1st, 2nd and 4th boxes.
   If you want to know, at a glance, whether you have new email waiting for you, keep the “Show an envelope icon in the notification area” checked.
   

Set a few exceptions
OK. Every once in a while, you do get an email that is really important, and you do want to be interrupted when it happens. Maybe you’re in IT, and you get an email notification if a server goes down. Ok, you need to know. The way to go is to set a few rules that will get your attention. When I get one of these important messages, my desktop alert (right, the Toast) pops up, and I get a dialog box showing me the critical message. The dialog box is there so if I’m away from my desk, I’ll see it as soon as I get back.

There are so many different options when creating rules in Outlook, that I won’t go into all of them here. The rules help in Outlooks is pretty good, so hit F1, type “rules,” and you should be good to go. The goal is to write enough rules to catch the really important stuff without having too many false alarms. It may take a while to find the balance that works for you.

I consider a message critical if it is

1. marked important,
   
2. from an “alert” server,
3. from Donette, or
4. from a small list of specific people and I am in the To field

Note: I also have a chicken little rule that processes messages from a small list of people that I’ve identified as likely to mark things urgent when they really aren’t. This rule runs first, and takes messages they mark important, and changes them to be not important. The names on my chicken little list is a closely guarded secret.

Keep your Oulook on the Calendar or Task view, rather than Email
Sounds simple, but it works. When my Outlook starts up, it’s on my Task list. It’s more important to keep what you planned to do today in front of you all the time, rather than email.  You can find this under Tools>Options. Click the “Other” tab, and “Advanced Options…”.

Also, when I’m done with email, I either minimize Outlook, or switch to my Task or Calendar views to prevent distraction.

Hope you find these helpful, and let me know what works for you.

Growing up, I would hear my step-father say, “one person’s ceiling is another person’s floor”. He isn’t a project management guru or anything like that, and like many of the things he said, I did not have a clue what he was talking about at the time. Turns out, he was on to something big.

One of the first questions to think about when you’re trying to get organized is what to do with a bunch of tasks that are all related? Easy, if you have a bunch of tasks, and they are all related, it’s called a project. But, there’s a catch. Often, what is a project to you is considered to be a task by those further up the chain. We even heard McCain and Obama recently go back and forth on what the difference is between strategy and tactics. I say “who cares?”

It turns out that lots of people care. That’s why there are tons of books, philosophies and methodologies that talk about esoteric definitions of projects, tasks, action items, work breakdown structures, work packets, and things like that. You should read all of them, because while you’re busy reading about doing things, the rest of us will be busy actually doing them. For personal project management, the only definition you really need is this: “projects are things you want to do and tasks are the actual physical actions you need to take in order get the things you want to do done.”

A side note to project managers. You folks have a very different job, and I have an enormous amount of respect for what you do. In this blog I’m talking to and about individuals managing their own stuff. You wrangle teams of people trying to accomplish things together, and deal with all kinds of interpersonal, communications and reporting issues. I come from the individual perspective. I’m not trying to claim project management expertise, disparage it, or reinvent it. I hope you can still find this blog useful.

For example, if you own a car, you should change your oil every once in a while. You put “Change Oil” on your to do list–it’s the thing you want to do–but it somehow never seems to get done. What if you took “Change Oil” and thought about it as a series of physical actions–the tasks you need to do to get the oil change project done.

Your oil change project might look like this:

Change Oil Project with One Task

If you do it yourself, it might look like this:

Change Oil Project with Three Tasks

If you’re doing it yourself for the first time, it might look like this:

Change Oil Project with Five Tasks

Get the idea? The project “change oil” is different for everyone, but the key to actually getting the project done is breaking it down into a series of the actual physical actions you need to take. This is a little academic, but it’s important. If you break projects down into a series of actionable steps, you’re more likely to be able to tackle the project a little at a time. Look at the oil change project broken down into 5 steps. if you have 10 minutes, you can do one of these steps, and make a little progress. If you don’t break it down, you’ll have to wait until you have several hours in your schedule to do it all. This is a recipe for procrastination.

But you know all that, why bother with all this? When you’re choosing a system to manage your stuff, it’s critical to make sure you can track both projects and tasks, and that the system has a good way of breaking projects down into tasks. Most To Do List managers out there fail in this regard, and that makes them pretty useless in my book. If you want to stand a chance with even mildly complicated projects, you need to find a system that does this well…really well.

As always, let me know what works for you.

-Adam

You want to start getting productive? Great. Me too. I’m not a project management, productivity or management guru. I don’t have my own book, toolkit, methodology, planner or software that I’m trying to sell either. But I do have a lot of experience in evaluating, creating and using things to help make people more productive, and I want to share it. I think it’s a fascinating area. If you’re reading this, you probably do, too.

So where to start? Well, I’m a big fan of a podcast on management that I’ll share later, and the approach they take is one that I think works here as well. Don’t focus on the theory. Focus on giving people things they can actually do. There are enough books and theories out there. My goal is to make things as simple and actionable as possible, so we can all get what we need to get done, done.

Like most of you, I’m always looking for the perfect system to keep me organized and on top of everything I need/want to do. It doesn’t exist. There’s no perfect system. I’m convinced of that, but I’ll keep looking. The purpose of this blog is to share what I learn along the way, and the tips, tools and tactics that work for me. I hope you find them interesting, and that they work for you, too.

So, let’s get started.

Here’s a list of things I plan to discuss (in no particular order):

• Outlook
• Remember the Milk
• 7 Habits/First Things First
• Mind Manager
• Bubbl.us
• DIY Planner
• Getting Things Done
• Inbox Zero
• 43 Folders
• Team Leadership
• Manager-Tools
• Palms, Treos and Blackberrys (oh my)
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Plaxo/Pulse
• Naymz
• VisualCV
• Your suggestions

Let me know what works for you,

-Adam