Have you ever had one of those “oh shit” moments where two seconds after sending an email you realized something was missing? And you know, by using the Outlook “Recall Message” feature, you’re just going to draw even more attention to your mistake. It’s like a highway accident… people will open recalled messages before anything else in their Inbox just to see what you might have screwed up.
Here’s one easy way to prevent that from happening: use this Outlook VBA macro to automatically scan your outgoing messages and stop incomplete emails & invites before they get sent. This macro will check for missing attachments on messages & meeting invites where you probably meant to attach something. It will also check for blank subject lines, as well as blank locations in meeting invites. Read the rest of this entry »
In my post on EverNote vs. OneNote, I mentioned handwriting recognition as one of the shortcomings in OneNote. I also mentioned that the implementation in EverNote is a bit disappointing as well because it uses a “shotgun” word approach. By that I mean that EverNote sets up an XML database of sorts where many possible words (most of them completely wrong) are attached to each handwritten word. If you search on any of those words, it will come up as a hit on that part of the image. You may be initially impressed when it magically finds the correct word when you search on that word, but the excitement fades when you realize lots of other words that aren’t even close will match as well. As I mentioned before, I do give the EverNote team a lot of credit for even attempting this, it’s just not quite good enough yet to be useful.
Having said that, the EverNote implementation did give me an interesting idea. Even though I capture a good percentage of my notes electronically using the DROE Tool, I still find it impossible to move away from handwritten notes entirely. There are too many situations where I either don’t have my laptop, or it’s not convenient or polite to use it. (I’m also too cheap to invest in a fancy image capture pen or tablet PC.) So here is my poor man’s solution…
I scan my hand-written Daily Record of Events (DROE) pages into a PDF file using the office copier. I then print these to OneNote, and I store them in my DROE Archive (@DONE section) as described in my post on “Bending OneNote and Outlook to Fit my GTD System“. I then add a >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>
Here’s the scenario… You are quickly clearing your email inbox before going home. You open a rather lengthy message and start to read through it. A vague idea forms in your head about what your response will be, but you’ve been reading it for 5 minutes now and haven’t gotten through the entire chain yet. It’s time to go home. You move the message to your @FollowUp folder but you don’t want to lose your train of thought. Here’s where this little trick comes in.
Click the “Note…” button on the message toolbar and just start typing, then close the dialog box. Move the message to your follow-up folder, and then come back later with your “note to self” intact. Okay, I know you probably don’t have this button, but I’ll show you how to create it.
This trick utilizes the colored message flags in Outlook. As you can see below, when you click the “Note…” button it brings up a dialog box. You can start typing any message you want (up to 100 characters). When finished, just click OK or hit [Return]. Your note is automatically saved with the message. Messages with notes can quickly be found because they have flags set, and your personal note is displayed on the dark bar in the header of the message (as shown below).
You can also schedule a reminder if you like by setting a date & time in the “Due by” field after typing your note. Another nice feature is that your notes are private. When you reply or forward the message, the note stays attached to the original message but does not travel with your outgoing message.
Here are the detailed instructions for setting up the button. Note that all of this is >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>
For those of you that don’t enjoy RPN calculators, you can skip this post… Yes, RPN does stand for Reverse Polish Notation. It doesn’t mean it’s a backwards way of doing things. Actually, it’s a much smarter more compact way of doing things. It was originally just “Polish Notation”, invented by Polish mathematician Jan Łukasiewicz in the early 1900s as a way to represent logic statements without the need for parentheses. Reverse Polish Notation simply means that the operator was moved from the beginning to the end of the statements, so + 1 2 became 1 2 + and the “=” key became an unnecessary vestige. One less button to press!
Although HP didn’t introduce the first ever RPN calculator, they definitely popularized it with their line of calculators. For a fun diversion, you can check out some of the history on the Museum of HP Calculators website.
So where am I going with all of this? Well, I grew very accustomed to the speed and convenience of my HP 42s, which I’ve had for more than 15 years now. I cringed whenever I had to do a calculation on a standard calculator, especially the one that comes loaded by default in Windows. I needed to have an RPN calculator at my finger tips, and thanks to Thomas Okken and the Free42 project, now I do. The image below is an actual screenshot from the Free42 program.
If you happen to be an aficionado of a different HP, there is >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>
Here is a quick sticky note hack that I like to call the “sticky note surprise”. Basically, you take a bunch of sticky notes, or Post-it® notes if you prefer, and affix them inside your planner. They are handy whenever you need them, wherever you are. If you miss someone at their desk and need to leave them a note, you can avoid that awkward moment when they return unexpectedly to find you rummaging through their stuff looking for paper. It’s also handy when you need to give out a phone number or scribble down an address for someone.
As you can see in the picture below, tucked inside the cover page are stacks of sticky notes of various sizes. Each stack contains about 5-7 notes. The front page works nicely for this since it is a heavier thicker paper than the tabs. Also, if you arrange enough stacks to fill most of the page, the page will lay fairly flat when you close the book.
By the way, the book I use is actually a 5½” x 8½” Blue Sky® Telephone/Address Book from Office Depot. It happens to be the same size as the Franklin-Covey “Classic” binder I used to have. The reason I like it is that >> READ THE REST OF THIS ENTRY >>
