Thanks,
Don

I’ll try to answer your questions, although this probably deserves it’s own post someday.

For status, I have used several other fields in the past, but I am mostly just using due dates now because I want to have sync capability with my mobile phone. On the mobile phone, there are only limited Outlook fields available. Anything with a due date of today is in the current action list (aka “next actions”). I flag hot items by setting the importance field and adding a category of !HOT. Any tasks with a future due date are in the “Scheduled” list. They will appear in the current actions list when they come due. This is sort of like a tickler file. Anything with no due date is in the Someday/Maybe list. These get checked during the weekly review and may get a due date assigned at that time. I also have a “WaitingFor” list for items with the @WF category.

I have Outlook views in the task folder that separate these lists out. For example, the “WaitingFor” items are separated from the current actions via a filter in the view.

I have buttons on my toolbar (visible here) that trigger small macros and allow me to change items and move them between lists with a single click. I also have a “refresh” button that sweeps through all of my tasks and moves completed items to an archive folder, and moves overdue items forward to today.

As for context, I am just using the categories field. Again, I have used other fields in the past, but the categories field is accessible. I simply add all of the contexts I use regularly to my Master Category List. I don’t add this to the task name.

Hope that helps!

-Carl

Great blog. Very helpful. You mentioned use of separating @Waiting For and @ Someday/Maybe as statuses and referenced a separate system that you use to track status.

My question(s):

1. How do you track status in Outlook? I have been using categories and created a task view that groups by category

2. Where do you enter the context (e.g., @Errands)? Is this part of the task name?

Thanks. You have been incredibly generous with your time.

Kind Regards,
Gary

I don’t know of a way to add the [tags] automatically in OneNote, but you could do something with VBA in Outlook once they are synced. Unfortunately the sync is sort of one time (other than status). That’s why I added it to the template to remind myself.

I’ll curious about the [tag] format you are using and how it is in the subject of each task. Are you typing that in yourself for each NA or is there some automatic way of getting the project’s tag name into each task?

Thanks for a great write up on a very nice GTD implementation.

Jason

-Carl

My name is Freddy and I’ve wasted nearly a month of my life on this place I found it after being recommended by a few friends who have been hanging out here for quite some time.

I am a writer, graphics artist, photographer and just about anything else that comes up around the office. Aside from the above interests i’m really into scifi as I know that is so much more out there to be discovered, and a feeling that the universe is just teaming with life.

Well, I hope that I get to know more people here, share some experience and start learning. Have a greay day!

It’s great to know that you are back, Welcome back! Thanks a lot taking the time to provide detailed responses to my questions, I am very grateful

I agree with you that Categories and even maybe Outlook folders are best customized for each person. The only reason I asked was to see if there was an optimum/complimentary way to make these work with your OneNote/GTD setup.

I ran in to similar problems with my @Office and @Anywhere lists, where I had a disproportionately long number of items, so I did away with @Anywhere too.

Regarding your comment on @Waiting-For and @Someday-Maybe:
I agree. Just to share what I do, I only use “@” prefix for my Next Action context lists (like @Home, @Office, etc) and no prefix for general lists (like Someday-Maybe). It works well with Outlook To-Do bar which automatically sorts “@” to the top, so the top half of the bar is all my NA context lists, whereas the bottom half is regular lists (which I don’t need to access that often).

For projects in OneNote, that’s actually what I ended up doing I have @Projects-Work and @Projects-Personal, just those two.

Regarding ClearContext vs. the NetCentrics GTD Outlook Add-In:
I did read some reviews/comparisons and my general impression was similar to yours. I also felt that ClearContext had better features. I like the Dashboard, list of attachments, jump (to project/topic) feature amongst others. So overall ClearContext seemed like a better choice.

You requested features for CC are great! Thanks for doing that, and for taking an active interest in the upcoming features. I really wish they do incorporate most of them!

Thanks again Carl!

BTW, an idea for a future post (might work better after your promised Outlook setup post):
Going over your typical workflow:
Describing how your start your day, is it by going over inbox, tasks, calendar? And how do you process stuff? For example, when you process you inbox, how do you get to inbox zero and bring OneNote, Outlook folders/Categories, ClearContext, WDS/GTDS into play?

Regarding ClearContext vs. the NetCentrics GTD Outlook Add-In, I have not had a chance to really compare the two. I have never installed the NetCentrics Add-In, so I can’t really comment on it first hand. It always looked interesting, but it did not seem like it was well supported and the reviews I read online indicated that it was a little buggy. Again, I can’t say that from my own experience. I have posted a list of requested ClearContext improvements, and the team is working on a new release.

Hope that helps.

-Carl

Sorry for the slow responses, I’m back in town now and catching up… To answer your question on contexts/categories, I’m happy to share what I’m using, but I don’t think I’ve found the magic solution yet. I would also say that this is the part of GTD that really should be customized for each person, so my list may not be all that useful.

First of all, I only use contexts for Outlook tasks. Emails do not get categorized, and neither do appointments. For tasks, I was initially putting a lot of things into @Office but then realized the list was getting huge. I tried to split it up so that I would have 30-50 items in each context so that I could view the list on one screen. I didn’t want to create too many contexts, however, because I didn’t want to think too hard when assigning a context or fall into the trap of assigning multiple contexts to each item.

Here is the compromise I came up with. “AA” below would be your company name. I inserted that so those items would sort together in my task lists.
@AA-Agendas
@AA-Computer
@AA-Office
@AA-Private
@Errands
@Home-General
@Home-Office
@Phone
@Read-Review

Most of these are self-explanatory. The @AA-Private list if for things that require more privacy and fewer interruptions, such as writing annual reviews for employees. Likewise, the @Home-Office list is for things that require more concentration, like bills or tending to my blog. The @Home-General list is for everything else @Home (home repairs, clean up, etc).

I dropped the @Anywhere context because it required me to always check two lists. Instead, I just try to pick the best context that fits, even if the task could be done “anywhere”. I also stopped using the @WaitingFor and @Someday-Maybe contexts because they were really statuses and not contexts. I have a whole separate system for managing statuses for tasks.

I did add an @Mindless context for mindless tasks that can fill time when I have limited attention or energy, but I haven’t used it much yet. I haven’t decided yet if it helps me.

For the project lists, you are correct that the examples above show the work and personal/home project lists combined. It depends on how many projects you have. If it is more than would fit on one screen, you can split the list into @PROJECTS-WORK, and @PROJECTS-HOME. I would not try to assign a true context to individual projects, however, since the tasks under each project may have many different contexts.

-Carl

On a related note, I know you like ClearContext, did you ever get to compare it with the NetCentrics GTD Outlook Add-In?

I would really appreciate your help with these questions, I hope it won’t take too much for your time

Best regards,
Waseem

I hope you are doing good. As you know I am currently trying to setup Outlook with GTD. OneNote was easy and fun to setup due to your excellent tutorial . I’ve found your responses to my earlier questions very helpful. I had one more query and I hope it won’t take too much of your time.

Can you please help me with Outlook/GTD categories? For a couple of months I used the defaults from the whitepaper (@CALLS, @ANYWHERE, @WORK, @HOME, Some Day/Maybe, REFERENCE, AGENDAS). But these don’t seem to be working, meaning I am not getting much use out to these.

I don’t know if it’s due to being in a typical 8-5 work environment, so for most of my day only the @WORK is pertinent. Also, since I am primarily dealing with email, it don’t feel like categorizing them with a catch-all category like @Work – ending up with a disproportionately large amount of tasks in one category.

So I was wondering if you could please share some input/feedback? And also please go over how you’ve setup your categories? (I am assuming you don’t have a .PROJECTS category in Outlook for a list of projects, as you can use the OneNote navigation bar as quick list?).

Finally, I noticed in your OneNote setup you don’t separate out work and personal projects. So, do you just keep them together/intertwined?

Again, I would really appreciate your help and feedback. Thanks!!

Waseem

Thanks Waseem!

-Carl

I hope this helps if you decide to make a post on the tool or if anyone else comes across the same issue with Outlook 2007.

The format you are seeing with “Outlook:000000004D68F19CE8…” looks generally correct. This is how you link to Outlook items using the Entry ID. For some reason, however, the link in your example above seems to be truncated. These IDs are generally much longer, maybe ~140 characters if I remember correctly. So, you might be missing the end of it. Also note that the EntryID will change if you move the Outlook item between data stores. For example, if you move a message from the Inbox to a PST file, or from one PST file to another PST file, that link will break because the item will get a new EntryID. Moving a message from one folder to another inside the same PST file should be no issue.

The only other difference I see is that I am using OL2003. That shouldn’t matter much, though. As you said, the tool should support OL2007 as well.

You could see if any support is available through the developer page.

- Carl

Hi Carl,

I am trying out the “Linker for Windows” tool you mentioned (great idea!) but I get this message when I click on an Outlook hyperlink in OneNote/Word (explorer hyperlinks work fine)
Unable to open Outlook:000000004D68F19CE825AB4CA2EFA296CE2E24E6044E2000. Can not open the specified file.

Just wanted to check if you came across this issue?

I’ve tired all four formats with no luck for Outlook hyperlinks. If I select “Include Folder path” I can even see the path and it looks correct, but same error message when I click it.

I have Outlook 2007, and their change log does mention support for it.

I also tried their old version “Linker for Outlook” but in vain and nothing useful came up on Google either

I think it’s a neat idea to do it this way, so let me try to incorporate your method and see how it goes.

Keep up the great work with the website and thanks for sharing your tips and taking out time to answer questions/comments.

My first recommendation is that if the “project” will only last a few days, just do it. Don’t create a page like this.

For larger projects, I add two links at the top of the Notes section. One is called “OUTLOOK FOLDER” and another is called “EXPLORER FOLDER”. In the example above the Explorer Folder is called “Primary Folder”, but the idea is the same. This is the link to a folder I create on my hard drive for saved attachments, working files, etc.

The OUTLOOK FOLDER link is a link to a folder I create inside Outlook (in a PST file). At first, the messages might be sitting in my Inbox, or in a general archive folder. When I realize this is a longer term project, I create a dedicated folder and move all of the messages there. I then create a link to the Outlook folder using a free utility named Linker, which is available here. I should probably create a separate post on how to setup and use this tool!

Once both links are on the project page, that page can be the starting point whenever I need to touch that project. As a reminder, anything in the notes/reference section is considered to be already “processed”, meaning that the tasks/actions are captured in the “ACTIONS” section above it.

I know there is a temptation to start dragging all of the emails to the project page, but this creates extra work. It also gets confusing if there are multiple conversations going in different directions. You might want to attach one or two if they are critical and referenced frequently, but not too many.

Another interesting tool might be ClearContext. In today’s version, there are some project management capabilities, but unfortunately there is no proper “project page” or place to capture notes at a project level. They are planning to expand this in CCv5 however, so I am definitely interested to see the final result.

Hope that helps!

-Carl

Hi Carl,
I hope all is well with you. While we anxiously await the Outlook part of your GTD setup, can you please help with a dilemma? I would greatly appreciate it.

Here’s a scenario, please share your thoughts on how you would handle this in you Outlook/OneNote/GTD:
1. You work in a team and get an email from another team to help with some data/results that you will need to generate.
2. There are 5-6 emails back and forth clarifying the details of what all they need from you.
3. There are also 5-6 emails with reference data/material for you. There reference data is both in the e-mail body/text and as attachments.
4. Then are 4-5 emails where you’ve generated preliminary data and shared with them and then there are further discussions and refinements on what else they need.
5. You now have a bunch of data (files, PDFs, etc) on your computer that you’ve either generated or downloaded from the internet.
6. Step 4 repeats for 2-3 days and finally you are able to provide all the data.

Here are four main sources of my confusion:
1. Normally one would get a project, make a OneNote page using your template (which is uber-useful!), brainstorm the NAs and start doing.
But this scenario is quite dynamic, where you are working on the project while it’s being defined.
2. How do you use your template with this? The starting point is easy, make a new page with title, put the 1st email in reference section, but what next? Do you keep adding all the rest of the emails?
3. How do you make a project support folder? Remember, the reference material is in three mediums (email text/body, attachments, and on your computer). Would you make a folder on your computer dump everything there (including emails)? Or would you make a folder in Outlook and put all related emails there?
4. How would categories (@this, @that, etc) come into play?

I hope I’ve not confused you . I would be anxiously awaiting a response from the GTD guru

Thank you so much Carl!

Best regards,
Waseem

Yes, please do write about the Outlook side of your GTD – I am sure it’ll turn out to be a great reference as well.

You current feedback is certainly very helpful, I am already using your attachments macro .

Looking forward to the Outlook post! Thanks again!

For emails that require more immediate attention, I either complete the action immediately, or I convert them into tasks and file away the original message as described in your #3 above. If you want to make this process quicker, you can create a “convert to task” macro and put that button on your toolbars, or use the built-in functionality in ClearContext. Unfortunately the Task feature is not in the free version of ClearContext, so if you are not planning to use the other “Pro” features, you may want to use a VBA macro.

Also, for messages with large attachments, you can strip the attachment using the macro here before attaching the message to your task. Otherwise, your Tasks folder may cause you to exceed your server storage limit.

Hope that helps. I’ll try to get more details out there in a future blog post.

-Carl

Can you also please share details on your Outlook GTD setup?

As I understand you use OneNote as part of your GTD setup, in conjunction with/to compliment Outlook.

Here’s my dilemma:
I have setup Outlook according to the “GTD and Outlook 2007″ white paper. I primarily use the To-Do bar with my tasks categorized according to contexts. So far so good BUT most of my day I deal with emails (corporate work environment), so most of my projects (as per GTD definition) and tasks come through email.
Here’s the problem:
If I categorize emails as per contexts, they don’t appear in the To-Do bar unless I flag them too. I feel this has several drawbacks:
1. Extra step to flag
2. The email itself isn’t a true NA, right? We need to process it to define the NA(s)
3. If I right click and drag it to “Tasks” to convert it into a tasks, then I can modify the subject to a NA (and have the email in body for reference, or replying back when done) – BUT – this is time consuming in my case (where I mostly deal with email throughout the day)

Alternative:
Categorize email but don’t have email in To-Do bar (by not flagging or not converting to task). Meaning, work from two places: To-Do bar for other stuff and emails arranged by category for emails.

What do you think? I hope I’ve made sense and that you are able to understand my dilemma.

Please do share your Outlook GTD workflow/process and especially how you handle email.

I would really appreciate it. Thanks again!

-Carl

Thanx a lot

Just wanted to let you know that I have started a community site for OneNote fans. Join the conversation at http://www.iheartonenote.com. Read the blog, view or upload a Notebook, participate in discussions

-Carl

-Carl

Thanks

=====
I can also paste particularly important emails here… I usually strip the attachments first using an Outlook VBA macro that I wrote. This keeps the size of the embedded email small. The VBA macro replaces the files with links, so no traceability is lost.

Your comment on setting context for both emails and tasks is exactly right. One of the ways I’ve been working around that is using the ClearContext tool, as described here. See the description of the Dashboard and Related View features. Note that “Related View” is now called “Message Context” in the latest release of ClearContext.

-Carl

-Carl

The brackets do still serve as a quick visual cue of the project title, and you can use them in Outlook searches. For example, all of the Outlook tasks that I created as part of my Basement project also had the [Basement] tag in the subject line. When you press CTRL-E while viewing your Outlook tasks, you can quickly find all tasks in that project by searching with the [brackets]. (Note that CTRL+E is the shortcut in OL 2003… I assume OL 2007 has the same or similar shortcut, but I don’t have a copy to test.)

If you are dead set on searching project titles in WDS/Vista Search and OneNote, you could try using a different character to delimit the project title. You’d have to experiment to see which ones are not excluded from the search and are still visually helpful.

-Carl

I try to move only whole pages into the @FOLLOW UP tab. Web clippings, clippings from Office Documents, etc. come into OneNote on their own individual pages and I try not to edit them too much.

Small text notes that I make in the DROE just stay in the DROE page, which has a single large text frame. As I process the text notes inside the DROE, I move my text separator bar up towards the top of the page. Anything below the bar is considered processed/handled. The actions are either complete, or I’ve created a task in Outlook. For more information (and pictures) of the text separator bar, download the DROE Tool and read section 2.1 of the README file. You can also get the README file directly here if you don’t want to download the DROE Tool.

-Carl

just one question. How do you manipulate with text in OneNote? Do you copy everything into one text frame (for example from DOING to FOLLOW UP, or you use individual text frames for different information on one page?

I’m still not sure what is better. Thank you.

The @FOLLOW UP tab is used to defer items until I am ready to act on them. I don’t want to put them in @DONE because they are not done, and I don’t want to leave them in @DOING because I don’t want to see them 20 times per day when I am making notes in my DROE. So, I store them in @FOLLOW UP.

During my weekly review, I look at everything in the @FOLLOW UP tab and either:
(1) handle it immediately,
or (2) move it to @DOING if I plan to handle it in the next 7 days,
or (3) move it to @DONE if no action is required,
or (4) leave it in @FOLLOW UP for one more week.

An example might be a new software tool I want to try out. If I don’t have time to download & install it, I will clip the web page to OneNote and move it to @FOLLOW UP. Eventually, during a weekly review, I will move the page back to @DOING so that I can handle it later in the week.

Hope that helps.

Carl

would you be so kind to describe how do you use the FOLLOW_UP folder in your One Note? What information goes to this folder?

Thanks for your comments. So, you’re looking for some sort of integrated time/effort tracking & reporting. One of best tools I’ve found in general for task tracking (especially within collaborative teams) is the multi-user version of TaskFreak. It’s free, open source, well written, and GTD compliant. There is also a time clock plug-in you can install to do the time/effort management tracking you need. I use this with my team quite a bit and plan to write a separate post with the details.

Of course, this does not really integrate with the personal GTD system I’m showing here. For that, you would want some sort of Outlook plugin that could track time for the individual tasks right in Outlook. I could imagine start & stop buttons on the Outlook toolbar that triggered a VBA macro and wrote the currently selected task title, task ID, and time stamp into an XML or CSV file for later processing. There may already be some examples on the Outlook Code web site.

For more general time management tips, I provided some suggestions and links in this post.

Hope that helps!
Carl

There are several tools for that like worktime, timepanic but what i am looking for is a “really working” and “compatible – syncable” one.

Can you recommend me time tracking tool which can be integrated in this GTD system ?

Thanks

Hope that helps!
Carl

Thanks for the screen shot. It almost seems like there is no active cursor or nowhere for OneNote to attach the Task tag. The only way I was able to reproduce that situation was by creating a new Section in OneNote and deleting all of the pages in the Section. I then saw the same situation as in your screenshot.

In most cases, even when Outlook is closed, you should still have the option to create Outlook tasks from OneNote. The only exception might be if Outlook is closed and you have multiple email profiles defined. See this note from the OneNote help: “If your installation of Outlook is configured for multiple e-mail profiles, you must start Outlook before you can successfully create and save Outlook tasks in OneNote.”

I’m definitely not an expert on the internal workings of OneNote. If my suggestions above don’t work, you might be able to get more in depth technical help (or at least report a bug) on the Microsoft OneNote forum. Here is the link.

-Carl

See screenshot: http://thingvoll.net/onenote.jpg

Here is process for those that don’t trust the linking:
[1] As soon as you create a task in OneNote, right click on the flag and open the task in Outlook to convince yourself that it’s really there, and to set any other fields (such as categories) that you can’t set from OneNote.
[2] Consider anything on your OneNote project page with a task flag or a task check (open or closed) as “handled” by Outlook and don’t worry about it anymore during your project review.
[3] Track all task closures in Outlook.

-Carl

To answer your first question, you could add it in a number of ways. I will often use Jott since I don’t have a PDA phone. There are also similar services in Europe and elsewhere. An email would be fine too since you know it would eventually get processed and not lost. When you process the email, you could create a task directly in Outlook, or paste it into a OneNote project first.

As for your second question, you can mark the task complete in either Outlook or OneNote and the two will (eventually) synchronize as long as you don’t move or delete the task in Outlook. For more details, see my post on OneNote and Outlook Task Synchronization.

Hope that helps!

Carl

And, when the task is done, can I mark is off as completed in Outlook? Will it be marked done in OneNote as well?

Thanks for the tips, Jack. I noticed that cycling the ‘Show only Checked Item’ box fixes the summary issue I am seeing. (I only use checkbox Tags, but I am seeing the summary problem described previously). It’s a pain that I have to cycle it every time to refresh it, but I can live with it as it’s the same amount of time as hitting the ‘Refresh Results’ Button.

Your article points to the need for tighter integration between Outlook and OneNote. Whether you work primarily in either app, there will be some clunkiness as you move data backwards and forward. It will be great when the integration is seamless.

Initially, I didn’t understand your comments about the ON tag summary, but I get it now. You’re quite correct – “create summary page” provides no links. I assume it is designed to set up a page for printing, rather than as a launchpad. I very rarely use it given its limited functionality. What I do use constantly is the “Show all tagged notes” command which creates a Tags Summary with hyperlinks back to the original pages.

A few tips that might help:
Undock the tags summary window and position it front and center. It will retain that position and size when you need it.

Secondly, make sure you add some text when you insert a tag onto a page. Sometimes, I would add just an urgent tag next to some pre-inserted text and wonder why it wouldn’t appear in the summary. A phone icon isn’t enough on it own – add “call Bill” or whatever and then it will pop up in the summary. “Call Bill” will also be the hyperlinked text that can launch the original page.

Finally, if you can’t see a particular tag in the summary, remove the tick from “show only unchecked items”. If you use icons without check boxes (like the phone or exclamation mark) they don’t appear unless you uncheck the box.

Hope all this of use to someone.

Best >> Jack

-Carl

-Carl

I had this same issue too. The problem is in onenote. Make sure your new page in onenote isn’t autostamped with the date. Look at your one note page just below the title box. Do you see a date? If so highlight it and delete it. Then rerun the tool and it should work or at least it did for me.

Great tool. I will be getting a lot of use out of it!

Tripp

I’m getting the same issue (almost) as Tripp. I’m running Onenote 2007 and Vista 32 bit. I don’t get the time out error, but win n causes my DROE page to open, then the cursor jumps into the title bar of the page, with no date and time stamp I’ve double and triple checked the ini file and followed the steps exactly. If I’ve messed it up, I can’t see where. Any further suggestions? By the way, thanks for some fantastic help and advice on these pages.

Just rearranged my OneNote to something similar to yours. I’ve put my projects in tabs rather than single pages, just because I tend to work on long projects and don’t want mega long pages. So I’ve put these project tabs into project section.

I do have one question: I’ve got a couple of very ongoing projects. But they are so big I don’t know whether they really are a project. For instance I help set up and run a design group called Coalition. I think of this as a big marketing project… but it doesn’t really have an end as such, like a project “run company” would be a bit daft! How do you think your setup should deal with this kind of thing? Appreciate any advice!

Thanks,
Andy

Thanks,
Carl

I have a (text) page separator, basically an electronic version of what used to come with the Franklin Planner. I move it up in the DROE as I process notes. Anything before separator is considered done/processed. I’ll see if I can get some screen shots up so you can see it. (UPDATE: Screen shots and page separator description are included in the README file for the DROE Tool, available on the Downloads page). With the page separator in place, you can keep using the same DROE page for a year or more without having to archive (although I usually move stuff to the “@DONE” section about once per month). To index the DROE, I let WDS do the work. It’s all indexed for me without having to manually tag or file.

Hope that helps.

-Carl

I do still plan to write a post showing all of the OneNote setup screens, as well as the other topics you mentioned. You didn’t miss it : )

As far as linking tasks… The tasks created from the OneNote project page have an attachment linking them back to the project as described in another post. Tasks created directly in Outlook are only linked by the project [tag] in the subject line. I can tie all of the project items together by searching on the tag in WDS, or I can open OneNote (WIN-SHIFT-N) and browse to the project page. If it’s a task for which I will need to frequently reference the project information, I will jump back to the project page and create it from there rather than creating it directly in Outlook.

-Carl

How do you link a task you create in outlook that is related to a project you are managing in onenote? I assume that you do not use the mange project section of GTD add on for Outlook to manage projects.

Al

You mentioned that you would walk us through setup screens and share set up details, tips & tricks, and weekly review methods in a future post. Have you done that already? And if so, where might I find it?

Al

Thanks that does help.

Al

I probably overloaded the word “tag” above… In this case, my tags have nothing to do with OneNote tags. If you scroll up to my comment from Nov 19th, you will see that I don’t really care much for the OneNote tag implementation and am not making much use of it.

The tags I’m talking about are just short manual text mnemonics that help me tie the project together. For example, when I click the flag to add an item as a task in Outlook, the task shows up with this tag. I can then easily sort my Outlook task list by project, or search on the tag via WDS. The template provided in this link has some dummy tags to help me get started when creating a new project. Even though the tags are manual, it’s very easy to copy & paste the tag within the project page, and obviously there is no limit to the number of tags.

Hope that helps.

-Carl

Thanks for the follow-up and, again, nice job. Your postings have help out quite a bit.

Matt

Hope that helps.

-Carl

I notice on the screenshot of your project template that that your Title as well as Actions include the text “[Basement]“.

I am wondering how this text relates to your system. If you could briefly explain what this text is and how you use it, we would appreciated it.

Thanks in advance.

Matt

Update 1: I took a look at my code again. I have a lot of other scripts/functions tied in with the DROE code, and also a lot of filenames that are hardwired. I’m going to take some time to clean it up before posting and maybe make some of the filenames/paths easily configurable. Sorry for the delay!

Update 2: Finally got it posted! Here is the link.

-Carl

Great Post, I was looking for a way to link OneNote and Outlook for GTD, with exactly the same objective being to keep Outlook for my task list.

I’ve setup my OneNote like yours and downloaded the Autohotkey app. I’ve try to create my own script without success, could you provide me with your script for starting OneNote with th DROE page.

Thanks

Pierre

-Carl

-Carl

Thanks, I’ll have to take a look at the Journal powertoy, I haven’t tried it. As for tags, I don’t use them much. As a former EverNote user I am pretty disappointed in how Microsoft implemented the tags in OneNote. Initially I was using OneNote tags to track which items had been processed vs. which were still “not done”. This was a bit awkward in OneNote since there are no rules to automatically assign and unassigned tags, and no tag intersection panel like in EverNote. I tried to get around this by creating a tag “Summary Page” in OneNote during the weekly review. The problem with the summary page is that it’s just a dead list with no links back to the original content. If you need to see beyond the title or first line, you have to navigate back to the original page. Finally, I settled on using the note location (@DOING vs. @DONE sections) instead of tags. Maybe I’m missing something – if you are using OneNote tags as part of your GTD system I’m sure others would like to know more about your setup.

I do still tag pages in order to categorize material for future reference. I wouldn’t say it’s part of my GTD system, just more of a filing method really. There are about 12 tags I created to do this. If anyone is interested I can share that list in a future post.

I don’t know much about the next version of OneNote… There are blogs maintained by members of the OneNote development team. Two of the blogs I have read are linked below, and they will link to other blogs from other members of the OneNote design team…

http://blogs.msdn.com/chris_pratley/

http://blogs.msdn.com/descapa/

-Carl

I personally use separate notebooks for: Journal (collecting with Journal powertoy), Single Actions, Projects, Reference & Archive.

I also use the Tags in OneNote (and I wish they were synchronized with Outlook Categories). Do you also use them but forgot to mention?

Also, do you happen to know anything about the next version of OneNote, other that it’s being developed?

Thanks, great article.
Looking forward for your posts.

Daniel,
Bucharest, Romania.

-Carl