Getting Things Done in Outlook and Microsoft To Do!

I've been away from my office for 10 business days and really didn't pay any attention to business email and so I thought now that my inbox is full it would be a great time to talk about the application of getting things done principles to managing email this is a diagram of David Allen's getting things done principles as it applies to email and in his process and this is grossly oversimplified but if you haven't read the book you really should it's a classic that's been around for almost two decades and it still Remains the most brilliant book that I've ever read about productivity so David would say that life's random inputs inputs excuse me are coming at us from all directions emails ideas phone calls texts uh other ideas letters all kinds of different things and at some point during the day we have to go to our collection basket which is our more often than not our inbox and have a process for going through and finding out what it is and if it's actionable or not and if it is actionable should we do it delegate it or defer it if it's not actionable then should we delete it let it incubate or save it as someday maybe information uh for later on and let me show you how I apply this to the email process and just a couple of uh quick rules so basically whenever we come across an email we have five different options um six actually one is to do nothing just go on to the next email if there's if it's not actionable and if I shouldn't save it I can always just archive it so if it is actionable I should do it if I can do it in two minutes or less if I can't do it in two minutes or less I should do it as a next action if I'm not the person to do it I should delegate it if I can't do it today then I should defer it until the day that I can and uh then I also have the option of just saving it as what I call someday maybe information which means to Archive it so let's talk about how we do that in our system where we're using uh office or what will now be called Microsoft 365. so a couple of different things use the web version of Outlook for Reading and Responding in the local version or the software application for sending and there's a reason for that the second thing is to use the focused inbox feature to separate just in time from just in case emails so just in time are the messages from my boss or from my customers that need an immediate response just in case means I can check that folder once a day it might be full of newsletters or other things along those lines as a plus use learn to use the keyboard shortcuts feature to quickly move between messages and use the email application for emailing but use Microsoft to do for managing the tasks that come out of there so what does that look like well first of all we're going to go to this is the web version of Microsoft Outlook and a lot of people don't realize that you can actually set up Outlook as a web app and so I'm using internet or not Internet Explorer so our Microsoft edge here which uh to no one's surprise is probably the best application for using uh Microsoft applications on the web and I go to Outlook pwa and that changes Outlook to a new window so right now I have 113 messages in my inbox which never happens because I practice inbox zero but a couple of things that we can do right away and notice I have two folders one is called focused one is called other focused and other the way that I turn that on is to go to the gear icon and select focused inbox if I turn that off everything goes into one inbox if I turn it on I have focused and other now how do things get into the other inbox I select a message and move and then I can say always move to focused inbox always move it to focused inbox I have a couple of different options and I can use these filters so that again in my focused inbox I only see the most important things and then in my other inbox I see things that like newsletters and things like that that I don't have to check very often as long as we're in the Outlook settings I want to try one more thing and that is I want to go to General and accessibility and notice that I have keyboard shortcuts here you may not even have known that they exist well here's one of the reasons why you should care about this David Allen again of GTD Fame says that you should uh the people who use keyboard shortcuts are usually four times more productive than their non-keyboard shortcut using compatriots and so I used Gmail and Gmail shortcuts for a long time before I ever used the Outlook ones so I prefer to use the Gmail ones and then if I go back to the Inbox and I press shift and question mark I see that there is a keyboard shortcut for almost everything so uh going back to our list of things to do we're using the web version of Outlook we've turned on the focused inbox feature I've shown you how to access those features now we go about processing email so I go to the Inbox and I'm looking for actionable items and if I go here and look I can see that sending something to the archive I press the letter e right here and if I flag this message with an S then it will be flagged as a task and that goes to Microsoft to do so I'll show you what that looks like so now that I have all these things set up I am simply looking at emails and now I'm in my other inbox and so I look at this can I do this in two seconds or less should I is there anything I should do with this no right now I don't want to do anything so I'm pressing e and that goes to the archive do I do anything with this document e this goes to the archive then as I look at this can I look at this in two minutes or less yes so now I'm pressing e to send that to the archive this I would like to go back and read so I'm going to press J which takes me to the next email um is there anything actionable here no anything actionable here well I'm going to go back and take a look at these emails from Apollo later so I'm pressing J to go on to the next message J to go on to the next message again here's another newsletter so I'm going to scroll through that very quickly any actionable items no no no any actionable items this yes so I'm going to save that and actually what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go back up here and if there's an actionable item and I can't do it in two minutes or less then I'm going to press the letter s to flag it and I'm going to press the letter e to Archive it s e s e s e s e um I'm not going to do anything with this email so I press the letter e the letter e the letter e okay and you can see how that goes I have a couple of other options here that are also very interesting if you've never been in the web version you've probably never noticed the icon up here that says my day and what this allows you to do is to either add things to your to see or to add things to your calendar or to see or add things for the to do and so if I'm looking through here and I see that I want to read this newsletter I can drag it over and I can turn it into a task any email can become a task and even further I can highlight anything and notice the little option that comes up here I can create a task from highlighted text I can no I can't do that so I'll create that task and so if the purpose of email is primarily to communicate actionable items or just in case information clearly there are aspects of Outlook that we haven't been using in order to be effective and that if we use those things we're going to become we're going to get much better at handling email and much better at completing tasks here's the software version you can see here there is a cloud-based version of Microsoft to do and you can go back and forth anything that I have flagged as an email you saw that I dragged this over to the tasks here's the task and notice that it also maintains a link to the original email so that when you convert an email to a task it also remembers the email to which it was attached so just another important thing to remember so I've given you more than a couple of ideas as to how we can more effectively manage emails and using tasks if you see some wisdom in this something that you might be interested in exploring then please reach out to me I would love to help you achieve inbox zero and get more effective in the way that you handle email

Channel: Todd Lohenry

Views: 28,690

Keywords: GTD, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft To Do

Id: q5OApveEnIw

Length: 12min 30sec (750 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 28 2022