A preliminary step in examining Bill Kratz's techniques for building your own GTD system inside of Microsoft Outlook is to understand one of the key linking features built into the program.

This is an incredibly simple and tremendously powerful adaptation of Outlook functionality.

Every type of Outlook item, be it a message, a task, a note or an appointment can be assigned either a contact or a category. Categories can be powerful if they are used systematically. They can aid in filtering and they are useful for grouping items together. The biggest failing of categories in Outlook however is that they are saved as a collection in a user's registry file. It is difficult to maintain categories other than inside of Outlook and, while there are some third party solutions that provide synchronization, categories are hard to share with other users in a workgroup.

Contacts can be associated with an item either through a Contacts button on an item's form or through the View/Options menu selection for messages. (A Contact can be associated with a note through the drop down menu at the top left-hand corner of the Note window.) When a contact window is opened, clicking on the Activities tab initiates an automatic search of all items associated with that contact. The key to this is that the search is automatic.

Bill Kratz took a look at this functionality and asked the question: What if another set of "Contacts" were created inside of Outlook that were actually Projects? The answer is simple. By assigning a contact from the Projects list then every item of correspondence, each task, all scheduled events and key notes related to the project can be found automatically using the built-in search feature for contacts in Outlook.

This is an incredibly simple and tremendously powerful adaptation of Outlook functionality. If you manage many different projects or juggle multiple responsibilities then you will find the techniques that Bill explains a real help in finding and staying on top of project responsibilities.

Important Note: The WH Kratz techniques only work with Outlook 2000 and higher.