Speed dating in Outlook

As I mentioned in part 3 of my GTD Odyssey series of posts (Part 1, 2, 3, 4), I've been using aspects of "Total Workday Control" to augment my personal Getting Things Done playbook.

Short recap

I was challenged by context lists alone so I used TWC's task processing method to assign dates to my tasks so they'd show up on my "dashboard" (example in the graphic at right) every day to remind me what I wanted on my candidate tasks list for the day. This means I run through holdover tasks every morning and either:

1. change their date to today's if I still want to consider them for today
2. change their date to a future date if I want to have them pop up in the future
3. remove the date so they go back to my Master Task list so I can reconsider them at my next weekly review

This system works great for me, and quite a few others who've taken it on.

Speed dating in Outlook

OK, now on to the speed dating aspect. One of the things about using this technique is that you need to enter lots of dates every day. I share an office with a guy named Gene, who uses a similar methodology to mine and he was complaining about how tedious it was to select dates in Outlook using their drop-down calendar.

I've been using a much easier method to assign dates. Gene thought it was useful, so I figured I'd share it here. Rather than typing the full date, or using the dropdown list, let's look at some other options.

In any date field in Outlook (tasks, calendar, reminders, you name it), the following shortcuts will work (all of these are based on Outlook 2003 - Outlook 2007 may have even added a few). Note that you don't have to worry about capitalization, and it understands that "2" and "two" have the same meaning.

What you can type	What Outlook will do with it
Enter a number in a date field (like "12")	Outlook will convert this to the next "day 12 of the month" - if the 12th has already passed in the current month, this will change it to the 12th of the following month.
Today	Converts to today's date. You can also type "now" to get the same effect.
Tomorrow	Converts to tomorrow's date. You can also type "day" to get the same effect.
Relative dates	Outlook understands quite a bit here. You can type things like the following, and Outlook will do the translation: Thursday Next Thursday Day after tomorrow 2 weeks 2 months Next year 2 years You can also use this to fill in dates in the past like "yesterday" and "last Thursday" You can get fancy, too - type "One week before valentines day" to set a handy reminder to get a gift for someone.
Day and month name shortcuts	While you can type "Next Thursday" as in the previous example, you can also type the day and month abbreviations: Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat, Sun Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec
Holiday names (like "Christmas" or "Valentine's Day")	Outlook will fill in the correct day for the holiday. It doesn't know that many, and this is more a novelty in my opinion. Others it knows include Halloween, Independence Day, and New Years Day. There may be more, but I haven't discovered them.
Time unit abbreviations	"mo" == month "y" == year "d" == day "w" == week
Calendar math expressions	If you want to do something a certain number of days before or after a date, you can use simple math expressions to tell Outlook when to schedule things. Some examples: "tomorrow + 2 weeks" or "tomorrow 2 weeks" translates to two weeks from tomorrow "Christmas 2d" will schedule something 2 days after Christmas Note - Outlook likes the plus sign, but doesn't like the minus sign, because it is too confusing for dates (12/24 and 12-24 are the same to Outlook). You have to use "One week before..." or "3 days before..." kinds of language like that described above in "Relative dates"
Time unit abbreviations	"mo" == month "y" == year "d" == day "w" == week
Holiday names (like "Christmas" or "Valentine's Day")	Outlook will fill in the correct day for the holiday. It doesn't know that many, and this is more a novelty in my opinion. Others it knows include Halloween, Independence Day, and New Years Day. There may be more, but I haven't discovered them.

Those are the ones I know about - do you know others? As you can see, some of these take longer to type than enter the date ("7/4" is much easier than "Independence Day"), but some of them like "today" or "2w" can save lots of time when scheduling activities, tasks, or other things requiring dates in Outlook.

Related items:

• Outlook and GTD - Filing and Archiving Tips (9/1/2005)
• Keeping Your Inbox Clean (8/26/2005)
• Getting your Inbox to Empty: Dealing with the first email purge (8/23/2005)
• Technorati: gadgets, GTD, productivity, Getting Things Done

Comments

[Heather Ledeboer]

Thank you for the great list of shortcuts!

[Dwayne Melancon]

Thanks for stopping by, Heather - your site is great, by the way!

[tallgirl]

Thank you for the great list of shortcuts, this can help me a lot, also I will tell my friends on tallfriends.com about it, they may come and read it.