Summary

Summary

These web pages illustrate my approach to integrating Outlook and GTD. There is nothing really mysterious about the methods presented; just the occasional use of a little trick or two to capitalize on the intrinsic capabilities of Outlook. Outlook is sometimes maligned as not flexible enough and difficult to adapt to one's working style. There is something to that criticism, but generally I find that a little experimentation, minor customization, and the judicious use of addins, make the program a powerful companion to the GTD methodology. For example, the "little trick" to the project management method illustrated on this site is simply to treat a "Project" as an Outlook "Contact". Outlook Contacts allow for easily creating links to other kinds of Outlook items, and the "Activities" tab in an Contact form provides myriad ways to view your links and the history of activities with your Contact, or in this case, your Project. You can use this approach in the most simple way, just to maintain your Projects list and link your Next Actions. Or you can use the full "contact management" features of Outlook to fully control and document your Project, its history, and its association to people, tasks, events, websites and any other "object" that might be floating around your computer. Over the years, I've spent more time than I want to contemplate searching for, trying out, and discarding software programs, methods and complicated schemes for handling my GTD implementation. I've been using the Outlook methods demonstrated here for years now, and I can say that, without doubt, they are the best approach I have found for integrating the simplicity of GTD with the usefulness of the ubiquitous Outlook. This is a simple, reliable method that works! It will only take you ten or fifteen minutes to try out the basics of this approach. Go to the "Settin g Up Outlook for GTD" page, try the first few steps in one of the sections, and see what you think. I doubt that you will be disappointed. Please Note: With only minor exceptions, the ideas I present complement and do not conflict with the Outlook fine-tuning presented in David Allen & Co.'s "Implementing David Allen & Co. Workflow Processing Using Microsoft Outlook".