Category sprawl and GTD

I’m in the process of doing a “reset” on my GTD system.  Basically, I ripped out all of my categories, printed out all my list and deleted them, and am starting from scratch.

Why? I found that I let my lists turn into “junk drawers” which meant that I was a) afraid to open some of them, and b) couldn’t find anything useful when I did force myself to open them.

One of the culprits was what I call “category sprawl,” which meant that I created so many granular categories for my tasks, and so many goofy ‘contexts’ that my lists really weren’t all that useful any more.

Basically, I acted like I was “special” and made a bunch of changes to the recommended GTD method.  It was fun for a while but turned out to be not such a great idea.  And now I’m paying the price.

Preventing the sprawl – my strategy

I’ve taken a number of steps to try to get back into a clean place with GTD:

1. I have reverted to the recommended, default contexts as recommended by David Allen (those shown in the screen grab at right). [Note:  I am about to add one additional category called @ONLINE but will try not to add any more].
2. I turned of automatic categorization in ClearContext so that I have to manually assign categories to tasks.  (This wasn’t an issue for the GTD Outlook Add-In)
3. I am “forcing” all of my next actions to fit into one of these categories.

There are (obviously) a lot of other tweaks I’m doing to my process, like getting back into the discipline of truly identifying physical next actions, moving all projects I’m not actively working on to SOMEDAY/MAYBE, and more.

If you’re a GTD person and you find yourself with category sprawl, this kind of a clean-slate approach might help.  Let me know if this resonates with you, or if you’ve got any best practices for a GTD reset.

Google Voice – the new Newton?

Back in the day, I had an Apple Newton PDA which was an early, stylus-based (and quite large, by today’s standards) handheld computer.  It was pretty cool but one of the love/hate attributes was its handwriting recognition.  You’d write clearly (or so you thought) but the Newton would mangle the words, creating a nonsense sentence.  This became a joke that was featured in the Doonesbury comic strip and other pop culture outlets.  A classic Newton joke:

Q: How many Newtons does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: Farm.

Google Voice

I’ve been using Google Voice for a while now, which is a great, free service that lets you use one, central phone number that can be dynamically routed to whatever other number you like.  One of the most interesting features is that it will allow you to “screen” incoming calls and choose whether to accept them, send them to voice mail, or send them to voice mail while you listen in to what they are saying (you can press a key to take the call if what they say is interesting).

Additionally, you can make long distance calls through Google Voice for “free” (you make a call via Google’s site and it “patches you in” so you don’t incur long distance charges).

Promises unfulfilled

One other feature that holds great promise is one in which Google Voice will transcribe your voice mails to text and email them to you.  This makes it easier to About this feature, I say “holds great promise” because it doesn’t quite have the transcription accuracy that makes this a killer app.  For example, consider this Newton-esque transcription of one of my voice mails:

Pretty hard to tell what this means.  To be fair, the bold text is the part of the transcription they had high confidence in, while the gray text is lower-confidence transcription (and they got the phone number right).

I’m hoping this feature improves – this is one promise I’d love to see them fulfill!  I’d love to be able to route all of my voice mail into my inbox for processing along with my emails.

A new option for Project Management in Outlook

Yesterday, I wrote about a gadget to help you with implementing Getting Things Done (GTD) in Outlook, and pointed out that it also had Project Management capabilities. Today, I am writing about a dedicated gadget for adding robust Project Management capabilities into Outlook.

This product is called “Missing Link Project Center,” and its special purpose in life is to turn Outlook into a full-fledged Project Management tool.  The integration is very polished, and takes advantage of lots of information to make your life easier.

The product’s author, Kevin Moore, claims this is “The Easiest Project Management Tool for Microsoft Outlook” which is  indicative of his philosophy in building the product.

Extending Outlook to align with the needs of Project Managers

Missing Link Project Center (MLPC) does a lot to make Outlook your single pane of glass for projects. It can seamlessly integrate a view that incorporates a project calendar, associated files, associated emails, tasks, and other elements of the project (click the example screen to the right for a larger view).  Project status can also be indicated using a red / yellow / green status indicator so everyone can tell at-a-glance whether the project is on track or at risk.

The integration also occurs into other aspects of Outlook, such as Contacts.  For example, one of the things you typically do in project management is assign tasks to resources, or assign resources to tasks.  If your resource is a contact within Outlook, MLPC extends the contact record so you can add “meta data” about the contact to make reporting and tracking easier.

Furthermore, you can send an email and associate it with a task in one step, since the add-in embeds Project Management-specific fields on the email form (as show in the screenshot at left).

The same kind of form extension is also present on Task forms so you can auto-associate them with projects as you create new tasks.

The integration also tracks versions of associated project documents, so you can report on the full history of the project at any point.  This makes it easy to analyze based on a historical accounting of project scope changes, requirements that have been adjusted, the disposition of tasks assigned, and much more.

Net-net

If you use “traditional” project management tools and either find them to be overkill, or realize you are spending most of your time trying to find project related items in Outlook, it will definitely be worth your while to try the free, 30-day trial of Missing Link Project Center.  And, if you like the product, Kevin’s offering a very attractive introductory price of $49 available right now – a great price for an impressive project management tool.

So how do you decide between the GTD Add-in I wrote about yesterday?  I think it’s fairly easy: 

• If you are a GTD adopter who needs a bit of project management for your personal projects, the GTD Add-in is your likely choice. 
• If you’re a project manager over projects that involve others, then MLPC is your likely choice.

And, of course, both of these require Outlook, which means you’ll need to be in an “Outlook shop” for either of these.

As always, let me know if you have your own mojo to share on these topics (either by comment, trackback, or link).