Working Smart

Automated Email Follow-up

In my experience as a manager, delegation is the easy part. Follow-up is the hard part. This is particularly true when it comes to e-mail.

I’m afraid that in the race to get through the scores of messages that daily hit our inbox, we hit the proverbial ball over the net, but never really follow-up to see what happened when the ball arrives in the other person’s court. Was it hit back? Was it tossed to someone else? Or, did it just hit the court and lay there with a hundred other balls. If it was the latter, then you really didn’t accomplish anything.

Delegation is a method for managers to get more work done. But if we don’t follow-up, we’ve only deceived ourselves, thinking that more work is getting done. The only way to really change this is to create a culture of follow-up (more about that in a future post) and be relentless with it.

One of the basic questions you have to ask as you go through your e-mail is whether or not this item requires an action. Sometimes, you will determine that you are the right person to take the next action. Often, you will determine that someone else is.

Technorati Tags: davidallen, gtd, productivity, workflow

Let’s assume it’s the latter. You forward the e-mail to the appropriate person and ask them to follow-up. But here’s where the system breaks down. We all know that some people are better at follow-up than others. With a few people, I can check it off my list (and dump it from my mind) when I make the assignment. But for all others, I either have to write the assignment down somewhere and then review this list regularly or I have to just trust that they will follow-up and hope for the best. As someone once told me, “hope is not a strategy.”

I have to admit, I am not too good at writing down every assignment. More often than I would like to admit, I hope people will follow-through, but I don’t loop back around to ensure that they did. Shame on me. Customers, fellow-employees, vendors don’t like to hear, “Well, I passed the buck to Fred. You'll have to check with him.” Instead, they are dying for someone to take full responsibility and follow through to the end. They want to hear your version of the Harry Truman quote, “The buck stops here.”

So how can we make it easier to follow-up on assignment that we delegate via e-mail? One option is to buy David Allen's Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In. If you use Outlook, this is worth taking a look at. It places a follow-up button onto every e-mail message. It’s very cool. When I was a Windows user, I found it indispensable. But it also does a lot of things that may make it difficult to justify the $69.95 cost. And, of course, if you are a Mac user, you are completely out of luck.

I would like to outline a solution that is very simple—and, best of all, free. Here’s how it works:

1. Create a free e-mail account at any one of the free services. I use Google's GMail. But there are many others available, including Yahoo, Mail.com, and Excite.
   
   
2. Set up an email address like “waitingfor.abc@gmail.com,” where the “abc” portion is your initials or some other identifier. If you have read David Allen’s book, you know that he recommends “Waiting For” as a category of items you use to list the projects that are in someone else’s court. You are “waiting for” them to do something, before you can proceed.
   
   
3. Set up your new account in your e-mail client. This will be different for each e-mail client, but most of these free e-mail services will walk you through the process.
   
   
4. Now create a folder under your inbox called “Waiting For.” For example, here’s how my inbox folder structure currently looks:
   
   



5. Now create a simple email rule that redirects all the e-mail coming from your “waitingfor” account to to the “Waiting For” folder. This process will be different, depending on the e-mail client you are using.

Okay, you’re ready to go. Now, whenever you want to track an assignment that you are delegating via e-mail, just enter your “waitingfor” e-mail address in the BCC field. (Since most e-mail software packages sport an auto-fill feature, you can generally do this with a few keystrokes.) Now, send your e-mail. If everything is set up correctly, your e-mail will go out from your main account and you will receive back an e-mail from your new “waitingfor” account. Your email rule will automatically file it in your “Waiting For” folder.

Now, during your weekly review (you are doing a “weekly review” aren't you?), you simply go to the Waiting For folder and review the assignments you have made. When the item has been completed to your satisfaction, you can drag the message to your e-mail archive. That’s all there is to it. Simple, elegant, and free.

WYWO Update

A few months ago, I uploaded my “While You Were Out” Outlook Add-In. Since that time, I have had a few bug reports from people who received a “dtpCallDate variable not defined” error. As it turns out, this is the result of an ActiveX control not being installed or correctly registered with Windows. Thanks to Jim Bonner for tracking this down and e-mailing me with the solution.

If you have experienced this error, here’s the fix:

1. Make sure that Outlook is not running. Close it down if necessary.
   
   
2. Download the control by clicking on this link: MSCOMCT2.OCX.
   
   
3. Save the file to your c:\windows\system32 folder.
   
   
4. Register the file in Windows by clicking Start | Run. In the Open field, type “regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\mscomct2.ocx” (without the quote marks). You should get a message that says, “DLLRegisterServer in c:\windows\system32\mscomct2.ocx succeeded.”

Now start Outlook and try to run WYWO again.

Google Gmail Now Offers POP Support

I’ve enjoyed using Google’s “GMail” as my web-based, public e-mail. (This is the address I use whenever I need to enter an address on-line.) I just discovered that you can now enable Pop (post office protocol) with GMail, so that you can download messages into your favorite e-mail client. I am now able to receive and send GMail from within Outlook 2003. Cool!

Taming Your E-Mail Inbox, Tip #2

Read Once, Then Decide

The most unproductive thing you can do when it comes to e-mail is to read the same messages over and over again. This has the effect of doubling, tripling, or even quadrupling your workload. Instead, you should read each message once, then decide what to do with it. Read-decide. Read-decide. This is the pattern of effective e-mail processing. The goal is to end up with an empty inbox daily or, at the very least, every couple of days.

According to author David Allen (Getting Things Done), you need to first decide if the message is actionable. There are only two possible responses to this: yes or no. If the answer is no, it is a Non-Actionable Message. You then have three possible choices:

1. Delete the message. It is no longer needed. Spam, most ads, and many e-mail newsletters fall into this category.
2. File it for later reference. It may be useful later. However, you don’t want to let it sit in your inbox consuming psychic energy. Instead drag it into a folder. Personally, I drag everything into a folder called Reference. By the way, I don’t use a complicated set of Outlook folders. Instead I use Google Desktop Search to locate messages I have filed away for future reference. In my opinion, if you use additional folders, you only add another layer of complexity. You have to ask and decide, “In which folder does this message go?” Instead, with a good search engine, all you have to do is remember a key word or two and call up all the messages that contain those words. Using this methodology, I can find almost any message in a matter of seconds.
3. Incubate it for later consideration. No action is required now, but something might need to be done later. I drag these into my Someday folder.

If the message is an Actionable Message, you also have three choices:

1. Delegate it to someone else. If the action requires an action, you have to ask, “Am I the right person to do it?” If not, then you need to delegate it. Even if you don’t have a staff, you can still delegate it to someone else in the organization. The best way to do this is to forward the e-mail message to the person who needs to act on it. Then—and this is critically important—immediately go to your Sent folder and drag the message to a @WaitingFor folder. You can then review this folder periodically to follow up on assignments you have made. (I’ll tell you how to automate this in a minute.)
2. Do it now. Assuming you are the right person, and assuming you can do it in two minutes or less, then do it now. Just take care of it, and get it off your plate. This is David Allen’s “Two Minute Rule,” and I have found it to be a great boon to my personal productivity.
3. Defer it for later. If you can’t do it in two minutes or less, then you need to make another decision. One option is to schedule a specific time to do it. This is particularly useful if you have a deadline you are trying to meet. The easiest way to do this is to drag the message to your Calendar folder and schedule an “appointment” with yourself. If it needs to happen on a specific day but not a specific time, then make it an all-day event. If it doesn’t need to be done by a specific time, you can drag the message to your Task folder and schedule a Next Action. I then periodically review my tasks through the week and select things to do that take longer than two minutes.

If you are a visual learner, then you will want to take a look at David Allen’s Advanced Workflow Diagram (this is a PDF file). You will find this diagram useful for both your electronic inbox and your physical inbox.

I also highly recommend David Allen’s “white paper,” called Getting Things Done Using Microsoft Outlook.

Finally, I also recommend David’s Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In, which automates the entire process I have described above. It adds a toolbar to your Outlook inbox that looks like this:

With this toolbar, you can perform the actions I have described above (and more) with one click. The software is not cheap ($69.95), but, considering what it will do for your productivity, it’s a great investment. Best of all, you can download a fully-functional trial version and use it for 30 days before you decide.

Taming Your E-mail Inbox, Tip #1

Only Process E-mail at Designated Times

In my experience, most people are overwhelmed by their e-mail. Throughout the day, they are bombarded with e-mail messages. Like a tennis match from hell, some feel obligated to hit every ball back across the net as soon as it lands in their court. Others eventually give up and allow the tennis balls to cover them up. Occasionally, they take a swing, but they can never seem to dig out from under the pile. Meanwhile, the never-ending assault of e-mail messages continues.

Enough of this madness! The problem is in the assumption. Contrary to popular opinion, there is not a law that says you must answer every e-mail as it is received. In fact, this is a sure-fire way to kill your productivity and end up becoming a slave to e-mail rather than using it as a tool to accomplish your work on your terms.

One simple way to do this is to schedule specific times of day to work on e-mail. For example, I check e-mail first thing in the morning, before I go to lunch, and at the end of the day. Since I use Outlook for things other than e-mail (e.g., calendaring, task management, etc.), I keep it running all day; I just work in offline mode. When I am ready to download e-mail at one of my designated times, I press F9, which initiates the Send/Receive All action. I then process each e-mail message. When I am done, I press F9 again to send any messages I have created.

The advantage of this is that I never work on e-mail for more than about 45 minutes a day. Using the two-minute rule, I handle any e-mail that can be done in less than two minutes. If I think it will take longer than that, I either add it to my task list or schedule a time to do it. (I’ll talk more about this in another Tip.)

How do you work offline? First, make sure that you have Outlook set to “manually detect connection state.” Here’s how to do it in Outlook 2003:

1. From the Outlook main screen, select Tools | E-mail Accounts.
2. Make sure that View or change existing e-mail accounts is selected on the E-mail Accounts wizard and click on Next.
3. Make sure Microsoft Exchange Server is selected and click on the Change button. This should take you to Exchange Server Settings. Click on the More Settings … button. You should get a dialog box that looks like this:



In the When starting section, make sure that Manually control connection state is selected and Choose the connection type when starting is checked.

4. Click OK, Next, and then Finish to get back to Outlook.

Now quit Outlook by pressing Alt-F4 or File | Exit.

Re-launch Outlook. You should get a dialog box that asks you whether you want to Connect to the server, Work Offline or Cancel. It looks like this:

Select Work Offline.

When you want to download your e-mail, simply press F9.

“While You Were Out” Outlook Addin

Sometimes I am amazed at what software developers omit in their software. For example, you would think that Outlook would offer a simple way for a user to take a phone message. Sure, you can just send an e-mail. Or, if you are trying to implement David Allen’s Getting Things Done system, you can have your assistant enter a task and assign it to the “@Calls” category, so it shows up in your Outlook task list.

This latter is the approach I used to take, until I realized I was missing important messages. In the hustle and bustle of the daily grind, I sometimes wouldn’t get a chance to check my task list for several hours. What I really wanted was both: I wanted an e-mail notification that I had received a message, and, if I needed to return the call, I wanted a task entered into my Outlook task list. This sounded like the perfect opportunity for me to write a simple Outlook VBA program to make this easy on my assistant and easy on me. (I know, I know, the President of a company shouldn’t be writing code, but I consider it a hobby and do it on my own time!)

The result is what I call “While You Were Out” (“WYWO” for short). It provides the user with the opportunity to take a message, capture all the relevant information, and send it on to the intended recipient. It’s written in VBA, which means there’s not an elegant way to deploy it. As a result, I will have to give you detailed instructions for installing it and getting it running. I will do that at the end of this post. But first, let me go over a few of the features, so you can make sure this is something you want to take the time to install.

Features

When you install WYWO, you will copy a custom button image to an Outlook toolbar and attach the VBA program to it. My toolbar looks like this:

When you click on the icon, you get a dialog box that looks like this:

Hopefully, most of the fields are self-explanatory. I was able to get the two assistants in our executive office running on it with about two minutes of explanation. However, let me point out a few of the features:

• The Date field uses the standard drop-down calendar. The Time field also uses this, but it is formatted to display the time. Both fields default to the current date and time.
  
  
• The To field can be set to a default value, using the Settings button at the bottom of the form. (More about that in a minute.) You can either manually enter a name in the Outlook format or an e-mail address. Alternatively, you can click on the To… button (just like the Outlook e-mail message form) and you will get a Select a Recipient dialog box with all your Outlook contacts. If you make a selection, the To field will be filled with your selected value. The CC field works the same way.
  
  
• The Type field has three possible values: “Voice Mail,” “Live Call” (you actually talked with the caller) and “Came By” (referring to a drop-in visitor). You can select a default value in the Settings dialog.
  
  
• The Urgency field also has three possible values: “Normal,” “High,” and “Low.” The program uses your selection to set the Importance level of both the e-mail message you send to the recipient and the (optional) task you create.
  
  
• The Caller and the Company fields are self-explanatory. The Phone field is set up to automatically format the field. Just enter the raw numbers without entering any parenthesis or hyphens. When you exit the field, the program will automatically format it. You can enter a default Area Code and phone Prefix in the Settings dialog. (This is a good thing to do the first time you use the program.) Once you do that, if you enter a four-digit number, the program will automatically add the default area code and prefix. If you enter a seven-digit number, the program will automatically add the default area code. If you begin the number with the international prefix of “011,” the program will leave the number unformatted. The Ext field is optional and is for a phone extension.
  
  
• The Action You Have Taken or Will Take group both encourages the user to take an action regarding the call (as opposed to just passing on the message) and also gives them the opportunity to tell you exactly what they have done. The Notes field provides them with additional space to elaborate if necessary.
  
  
• The Action Recipient Needs to Take gives the user an opportunity to explicitly specify what action is required by the recipient. And, again, the Notes field provides the user with additional space to elaborate. In the event that the user selects the option, “You must speak personally with the caller,” the program also creates an Outlook task for the recipient. (The recipient must have access to the recipient’s task folder for this to work; otherwise, the program will generate an error. However, the program will trap this, so it doesn’t crash. The user will be warned, and the task will not be created. The e-mail will be sent as usual.) This can also be adjusted in the Settings dialog box.

When the user clicks on the Send button, the program builds an e-mail message with all the relevant data and sends it to the user. As I mentioned in the last bullet above, the program also creates an Outlook task if the recipient must personally return the call. A default category for the task can also be set in the Settings dialog box (by default it is the GTD standard, “@Calls”).

The tag on the subject line—“WYWO”—allows you to create an e-mail rule that will be triggered by these messages. For example, you could play a specific sound or display a visual alert when you receive a WYWO message. If your assistant is also receiving copies (e.g., as a CC recipient), he or she could create a rule that will automatically move the message to a “Phone Log” folder. In addition, if necessary, the program generates an Outlook Task like the following one under the @Calls category:

The contents of the WYWO Notes field are also copied to the Notes field in the Outlook Task. I won’t go over the Settings dialog; I think it is self-explanatory.

Installation

Unfortunately, as I mentioned previously, there’s not an easy way to deploy a VBA program. Before you go through this process, let me make a little disclaimer:

This program was developed on Windows XP and Outlook 2003. I have not tested it on earlier versions of Windows or Outlook. Also, I consider this “alpha” software. It has not yet been beta-tested. If you use this program, consider yourself a “guinea pig.” You may find significant bugs. (Please report them to me. Before you do, see the bottom of this article for any updates.) Therefore, it may not work or may not work as expected. If you install and use this program, you do so at your own risk! I accept no responsibility for any damages or lost time you experience as a result of installing this program and using it. You’re on your own.

So, with that aside, here are the step-by-step installation instructions:

1. Download and install Redemption. You can find it here. This program allows WYWO avoid the constant Outlook security prompts when another program is trying to access Outlook e-mail. WYWO will not work without this module installed. Unzip the downloaded files into c:\Program Files\Redemption and double-click on the Install.exe file. This will automatically install Redemption.dll on your computer.
   
   
2. Download “While You Were Out.”You can find it here. Unzip the downloaded files into c:\Program Files\WYWO.
   
   
3. Load Microsoft Outlook. Again, as a reminder, I have only tested this program on Outlook 2003. Once Outlook is loaded, press Alt-F11 to bring up the Visual Basic Editor.
   
   
4. Import the WYWO components. On the upper left-hand side of the screen, you should see a Project window that looks similar to this:
   



Select File | Import File (or press Ctrl-M). Browse to the c:\Program Files\WYWO folder and then import frmAbout.frm, frmSettings.frm, frmWhileYouWereOut.frm, and WhileYouWereOut.bas. Now save the VBA Project file by selecting File | Save VBAProject.OTM or by pressing Ctrl-S. Now close the Visual Basic Editor by selecting File | Close and Return to Microsoft Office Outlook or press Alt-Q.



5. Copy the WYWO button image to the Windows clipboard. You will need this for the next step. You can do this by opening Microsoft Paint (choose Start | All Programs | Accessories | Paint). Open the Toolbar.ico file. It should be located in your c:\Program Files\WYWO folder. Now choose Edit | Select All and then Edit | Copy. This will put the button image on the Windows clipboard. You can now close Paint.
   
   
6. Install a macro button to run the WYWO program. Select Tools | Customize. This should bring up the Customize dialog box. Now click on the Commands tab. Click on the Macros category in the Categories list box. You should now be looking at a screen similar to this:
   
   
   
   Now click on the macro that is named “DisplayWhileYouWereOut.” Note that this may or may not be proceeded by the word “Project1” (as above). Now drag the macro to the toolbar. It doesn’t matter where you place it; you can put it anywhere you want. (As you can see from the screen shot at the beginning of this article, I placed mine just to the right of the Forward button.) Now right-click on the button itself. You should get a context menu that looks similar to this:
   
   
   
   In the Name field, replace the name of the macro with “While You Were Out.” This will become a “tool tip” when you later point at the button with the mouse. Now click on Paste Button Image. This will replace the default button image with the WYWO button image. Select Default Style, which will eliminate the text next to the button. Now close the Customize dialog box by clicking on the Close button. You’re done!

The first time you run the macro, you may get an Outlook Security warning. If so, follow the prompts to indicate that “Michael S. Hyatt” is a “Trusted Publisher.” (I have digitally signed the macro for this purpose.) Also, the first time you run the program, click on the Settings command button and enter your default values. Hopefully, you will find this program useful. If you like to dabble in writing VBA code, I think you will find the source code particularly interesting. I’m not a professional programmer, but perhaps you can learn from my work. I have tried to thoroughly document the code, so that you can more easily understand it.

Update: Some users have reported an error message to the effect that the “DTPCallDate variable is not defined.” If you get this message it is because an ActiveX control that the program uses is not installed on your system. Here’s how to install it:

1. Make sure that Outlook is not running. Close it down if necessary.
   
   
2. Download the control by clicking on this link: MSCOMCT2.OCX.
   
   
3. Save the file to your c:\windows\system32 folder.
   
   
4. Register the file in Windows by clicking Start | Run. In the Open field, type “regsvr32 c:\windows\system32\mscomct2.ocx” (without the quote marks). You should get a message that says, “DLLRegisterServer in c:\windows\system32\mscomct2.ocx succeeded.”

Now start Outlook and try to run WYWO again.

Overcoming E-mail Overload: Part 1

I don’t know about you, but I currently receive about 100 e-mail messages a day. Some of my colleagues get more. Some get less. Regardless, almost everyone I know complains about e-mail overload.

Regardless of how many messages you receive a day, my experience is that most people have a couple of thousand messages sitting in their inbox at any one time. They may have read—and reread—most of these messages. They may have some that are still unread. Regardless, several times a day, they sit staring at a very long, unruly list of e-mail messages. They hardly know where to begin. This results in feelings of anxiety, frustration, and, sometimes, even despair. In short, e-mail overload.

Surely, there’s got to be a better way! Fortunately, there is. In the next several posts, I want to discuss how to conquer e-mail overload. It’s easier than you think, but it begins by making three commitments:

1. Commit to implementing a better system. Admit it. What you are doing is not working. Or if it is working, it’s not working as well as it should. (Otherwise, you would still be reading this post.) You can’t work any harder. You are already working more than you should. What you need is a system that will allow you to work smarter. That’s what I hope to give you in this series of posts.
   
   
2. Commit to emptying your inbox daily. This is the goal and, I promise, it’s a realistic one. You may have days when you get behind. You may even go for a few days. But you must commit to the goal of an empty inbox or you will never get ahead. If you haven’t experienced it in a while, an empty inbox gives you a wonderful sense of being in control.
   
   
3. Commit to dealing with each message only once. The reason most people can’t get ahead of the curve, is because they keep reading the same e-mail messages over and over again. In effect, they are multiplying the number of messages they must process. They keep running the messages through the same processing loop without resolution. The secret to stopping this unproductive behavior is deciding that you will read each mail only once, then making a decision about what needs to be done. There are five and only five options, and I will discuss each of these in my next post.

By the way, in case you are wondering how many messages you actually get a day, Sue Mosher has created a simple macro in Outlook that will count your messages for you. If you want to use her macro, read the article carefully. It took me a couple of times through the article to get it right, but I now have it working.

How to Automate Your Weekly Review Process

In my last post, I wrote about The Importance of the Weekly Review. Now I want to show you how to automate this process by entering a series of tasks into Outlook using a simple VBA program. This will enable you to enter the list with a single mouseclick. (If you read my blog regularly, this is an adaptation of my post on Automating Your !Daily Disciplines Task List in Outlook.)

First, make sure that you have Outlook loaded. If you are new to VBA programming or “macros,” as they are sometimes called, start by selecting Tools | Macro | Macros … or just press Alt-F8. Either way, you’ll get a dialog box that looks similar to this:

Type in the phrase “WeeklyReview” (without the quotes). This will open up the VBA editor with the cursor positioned between the Sub and End Sub statements like this: o

Delete everything from the word Sub on the first line to the word Sub on the last line.

Now click here to open a  new browser window with the code. Select all of the text (using Ctrl-A), copy it to the Windows clipboard (Ctrl-C), and then go back to the VBA Editor. Now paste the code you copied to the clipboard into the editor window (Ctrl-V).

Your should now be looking at the code in the VBA editor. I have highlighted each of the tasks below in yellow. (You can click on the graphic to enlarge it.) You can modify these if you wish. If you have more Weekly Review tasks than I do, just copy one of the code blocks and paste it into the code. If you have fewer tasks, just delete the code block or comment it out by preceding the line with an apostrophe (actually, the foot mark: ').

Okay, you're almost done. Now close the VBA code window by pressing Alt-F4. Make sure you are now looking at Outlook. To run the basic macro, press Alt-F8, select the WeeklyReview macro and press Enter. All of your WeeklyReview tasks should be instantly entered into Outlook. If you have your tasks grouped by categories, you should have a task pad that looks similar to this:

If you want to really get fancy, you can assign this to an icon on the toolbar. My icon, for example, looks like this:

It took me about 10 minutes to create using the built-in icon editor that ships with Outlook. To get there, right-click on the Toolbar and select Customize. You will get a dialog box that looks similar to this:

Now follow these steps:

1. Select the word Macros in the Categories list box. All your macros will then appear in the Commands list box.
   
   
2. Select the WeeklyReview macro. (Note: It may be preceded by “Project1,” or some other project name, depending on how many other macros you have and how they are organized.)
   
   
3. With the left mouse button still depressed, drag the macro onto the tool bar where you want it.
   
   
4. Now right-click on the macro name on the tool bar.
   
   
5. If you don’t want to create an icon, just give the button a new name. If you want to create an icon, select Edit Button Image…

Now whenever you click on the button, the program will create the Weekly Review tasks.

Eight Things You Can Do in a Meeting with a TabletPC

As I wrote this past weekend, my TabletPC has enabled me to become far more productive in meetings. This is critical since I spend so much time in meetings—usually 30 hours or so per week. The last two days have been particularly intense.

Once a month, we take two full days to review each of our company’s publishing divisions and market channels. For me this means (gulp) eighteen 45-minute meetings in a row!

In the past, I would leave these kinds of meetings with a pile of notes and a plethora of action items. I would then have to spend two evenings going back through my notes, entering the action items into Outlook (as tasks), and then personally following-up on or delegating each of them.

By contrast, I left the meeting today with my notes filed and all my work done. Man, does that feel great! Here’s are eight things I was able to do in the meeting as a result of having a TabletPC:

1. Take notes. I wrote directly on my PC screen in my own handwriting. No, I didn’t convert it into text, nor do I have any intention to do so. My handwriting contains many nuances that are impossible to convert to text. Besides, the software converts my handwriting in the background, making it fully searchable should I need to find something later.
   
   
2. Enter tasks. As tasks were assigned, I entered them directly into Outlook. I entered assignments to my staff as "@WaitingFor" tasks, following David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) model. I also entered tasks for myself into Outook, using the appropriate GTD category.
   
   
3. Ask questions via e-mail. Occasionally, questions came up that we couldn’t answer in the meeting. Instead of waiting for a break or scheduling a follow-up for later, I just sent an e-mail to the appropriate person in the company. (Fortunately, we have wireless networking throughout the building.) I usually had the answer a few minutes later.
   
   
4. Make assignments via e-mail. If I needed to make an assignment to someone not present in the meeting, I simply sent an e-mail. If it was important enough to track, I used the GTD add-in to “send and delegate” the task.
   
   
5. Look up information in computer files. Following Michael Linenberg’s recommendation in Seize the Work Day, I have put together a collection of “Power Documents.” These are the documents that I find myself referring to again and again. When I need to refer to one of these, I could get to it instantly. Via the TabletPC, the most up-to-date documents were at my fingertips. And, because I was running wireless, I also had access to any files on the entire network.
   
   
6. Look up information on the Web. A couple of times, I needed to look up information on a Web site. Again, I didn’t have to send someone out for the information or wait until a later time. It was instantly available. (I must also confess: I was able to check our company’s stock price through the day.)
   
   
7. Respond to urgent messages. Naturally, while I am stuck in meetings, life goes on. People are calling, e-mailing, and even dropping by to see me. Fortunately, I could periodically scan my inbox to see if there was something that was urgent. If so, I could discretely reply. Everyone else thought I was simply taking notes. ;-)
   
   
8. Keep my staff moving forward. In the past, work would often come to a stand still because my staff couldn’t get to me. I was locked up in meetings and until I came up for air, they were stuck. Not any more. Now they just e-mail me. I’m about to take this to the next level and have everyone start using MSN Messenger.

I’m sure there are other things you can do in meetings with a TabletPC. These are my top ones. If you have others, I’d love to here from you.

Automating Your !Daily Disciplines Task List in Outlook

Yesterday, I wrote about how I use a !Daily Disciplines task category in Outlook. I use this category to group those basic tasks that I want to accomplish each morning before leaving for the office. Today, I want to tell you how to automate this list in Outlook, using a little VBA code. This will enable you to enter the list with a single mouse click.

First, make sure that you have Outlook loaded. If you are new to VBA programming or “macros,” as they are sometimes called, start by selecting Tools | Macro | Macros … or just press Alt-F8. Either way, you’ll get a dialog box that looks like this:

Type in the phrase “DailyDisciplines” (without the quotes). This will open up the VBA editor with the cursor positioned between the Sub and End Sub statements like this:

Delete everything from the word Sub on the first line to the word Sub on the last line.

Now click here to open a  new browser window with the code. Select all of the text (using Ctrl-A), copy it to the Windows clipboard (Ctrl-C), and then go back to the VBA Editor. Now paste the code you copied to the clipboard into the editor window (Ctrl-V).

Your should now be looking at the code in the VBA editor. I have highlighted each of the tasks in yellow. (You can click on the graphic to enlarge it.) Change these to tasks that are meaningful to you. If you have more tasks than I do, just copy one of the code blocks and paste it into the code. If you have fewer tasks, just delete the code block or comment it out by preceding the line with an apostrophe (actually, the foot mark: ').

Okay, you're almost done. Now close the VBA code window by pressing Alt-F4. Make sure you are now looking at Outlook. To run the basic macro, press Alt-F8, select the DailyDisciplines macro and press Enter. All of your Daily Discipline tasks should be instantly entered into Outlook. If you have your tasks grouped by categories, you should have a task pad that looks like this:

If you want to really get fancy, you can assign this to an icon on the toolbar. My icon, for example, looks like this:

It took me about 10 minutes to create using the built-in icon editor that ships with Outlook. To get there, right-click on the Toolbar and select Customize. You will get a dialog box that looks like this:

Now follow these steps:

1. Select the word Macros in the Categories list box. All your macros will then appear in the Commands list box.
   
2. Select the DailyDisciplines. (Note: It may be preceded by “Project1,” or some other project name, depending on how many other macros you have and how they are organized.)
   
3. With the left mouse button still depressed, drag the macro onto the tool bar where you want it.
   
4. Now right-click on the macro name on the tool bar.
   
5. If you don’t want to create an icon, just give the button a new name. If you want to create an icon, select Edit Button Image…

Now whenever you click on the button, the program will launch the additional windows.

This kind of automated list building has all kinds of possibilities. Perhaps you have already thought of some. In an upcoming post, I’ll show you how to use this basic methodology to build your weekly review list.