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.
One of the leading current thinkers of personal organization theory is David Allen, author of Getting Things Done. We became fascinated with the practical ideas behind the "GTD" after ordering the audio book from Audible.com a few years ago.
...you need a "mind like water"
Allen's premise is pretty simple; you need a "mind like water" -- a philosophy borrowed from karate that is used as a metaphor to describe the position of perfect readiness. If your work space or your mind are cluttered with multitudes of disconnected data, then it's going to be hard to create information. The first thing Allen recommends is collection of all of that data into one unified system.
Software developers provide all kinds of retainers for data collection but very few are used for information synthesis. For instance, Microsoft Outlook pulls together email, scheduling, notes and contact lists but you would be hard pressed to use Outlook -- out of the box -- as a project management or goal setting tool. Outlook is just another kind of repository or database, albeit a pretty popular one. To make database software really sing it needs the addition of a system that can help extract value and meaning from the growing store of data that it collects. In that sense, everyone who has Outlook has a potential development environment that can be extended to focus or reshape the meaning of the data that is contained in their Outlook database file. Not very many people can program for the Outlook environment but many have provided tools that can be obtained for free or for purchase. Netcentrics provides such a tool for sale at their web site.
You can also apply many of the GTD fundamentals on MS Outlook by way of a series of tips available through a now dormant site that was set up by Bill Kratz. Over the next few weeks we're going to re-examine Bill's work in order to determine how helpful it can be. Can you really get GTD functionality "on the cheap"? We'll find out.