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Part 1: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 – Overview
Provides an overview of Outlook and OneNote 2010 and how they fit in the Getting Things Done methodology

Part 2: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 – Outlook Setup
Covers the setup and customization of Outlook 2010 for GTD

Part 3: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 – OneNote Setup
Covers the setup and customization of OneNote 2010 for GTD

Part 4: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 – Collection
Details the capture and collection process of GTD, and to use OneNote to be the collection bucket for all things digital

Part 5: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 – Processing and Organizing Your Outlook Inbox
Applies the GTD processing and organizational principles to managing your Outlook Inbox

Part 6: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 – Processing and Organizing Your OneNote Inbox
Applies the GTD processing and organizational principles to managing your OneNote Inbox

Table of Contents: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010

In Part 5 of the GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 Series, we covered how we Process and Organize our Outlook Inbox. We’re now feeling good and can move on and process/organize our OneNote Inbox. Since we setup OneNote in part Three, we are capturing and collecting everything in one section. Now we can go from top to bottom, identify and decide what we should do with all our captured information.

Let’s get started!

If it’s trash…

Select the text and push the delete key. If it’s an entire page, right click the page and click Delete.
 

If there is no action…

Not all of our genius ideas and note taking need action…so we can do a couple of things.

1. File as Reference

With our reference system setup, we are giving ourselves a framework to always have a place to put things, even random things in a trusted system. In OneNote we deal with information in a couple of ways. I don’t implore any fancy OneNote techniques to organize, I’m simply moving information into the appropriate section.

1. Single element or text on a page – Select the text or picture or whatever it may be and Cut it (Right click and select Cut or push the Ctrl+X shortcut key). This information could be heading to your reference system, Someday/Maybe Lists, or Project List/Project Support Material. If there is already a page that you want to paste the information on, do so. If you need to make a new page, click the New Page button.
    
2. An entire page – If it’s an entire page, this is simple to move around in OneNote. You can click and drag the page to the desired section.
   You can also right click the page and select Move or Copy… Then use the Move/Copy dialog to move the page to it’s new home. I rarely use Copy, I generally only Move. I don’t want multiple copies of things confusing me. I’m already confused enough as it is!
   
   

1. Incubate It

Some things you’ll want to put on your Someday/Maybe lists. Maybe someone suggested a book to read, you came across a web link you want to explore more at a later time, or you had a great idea on how to save the world that you may want to implement some day. Use the methods above for moving that information to your Someday Maybe list in OneNote. This could be one whole page dedicated to the Someday/Maybe item, or it’s possible it falls into one of your broad categories like “Movies I’d Like to See” or “Places I’d Like to Travel”

But what if you want to be reminded of this Someday/Maybe item sometime in the near future? Well, we keep a Someday/Maybe list over in Outlook that allows us to add reminders to, so see how this works.

After you’ve moved your Someday/Maybe item in OneNote, go to that item and place your cursor before the first character. You can do this with text on the page, or even on the page title if you want to be reminded of a page with multiple items on it. Once your cursor is in place, push the shortcut key Ctrl+Shift+5 or select No Date from the Outlook Tasks button on the Home ribbon.

This will put a red flag to the left of the text or page title like so:
 
Or for an entire page:
 

Now head over to Outlook. You’ll see the tasks appear in the (none) section of your To Do bar. Categorize these in your Someday/Maybe section and add a reminder to it. If you don’t know how to do this, head back to Part Four and check out the Defer Section. If the item isn’t descriptively named, you can rename it here too. A cool thing about these items is they are linked between Outlook and OneNote. Double click the item in the Outlook To Do bar and you’ll see in icon for Link to Task in OneNote. Double click that and you’ll be taken to that page in OneNote.
 

You can do the same in OneNote to access the Outlook item by right clicking on the red flag and selecting Open Task in Outlook.
 
Don’t need the reminder any more? You can delete the task from Outlook or from OneNote. Check out the drop down menu above and you’ll see Delete Outlook Task. You can also mark these complete if you want from OneNote as well. Sweetness.

If there is an action…

Well, we’ll do it, defer it or delegate it. The trick is if we are deferring or delegating, how we get that into Outlook quickly. Let’s see how it’s done.

Delegate It

Usually we’ll be sending an email. If we are sending an email, and the page in OneNote has some context on what we are delegating, just email the page right from OneNote. Select the page, then go to the Home tab on the ribbon and click Email Page in the Outlook section.
 

Defer It

If we are deferring the action, then we are adding them to our Next Actions list in Outlook. Select the text or page and hit that good ol’ shortcut key we discussed previously, Ctrl+Shift+5. Head over to Outlook and categorize the task and rename it if necessary so that it describes the “next physical action”. Ambiguity on next actions are one of the main causes of not actually completing them. If you need more info on how to do this, check out the Defer section in Part Four.

Organizing Our Projects

One of the biggest challenges I had when setting up my GTD system with Outlook and OneNote is how to keep track of all my projects, project support material, know where this information is and have an easy way of viewing and reviewing all my projects for my Weekly Review. I got frustrated with keeping my project’s in one section, and then my Project Support Material in another. OneNote 2010 has some cool new features that we can use to help us with this issue.

Project Workflow

Whenever I’m processing and come across something that takes multiple actions (which is more often than not by the way), here’s what happens:

1. I go to my Projects section in OneNote and create a new page from a project template I created. If you want more information on creating page templates, go to Part Three to see how to create them. The page name is a simple and clear name for the project.
   
2. Depending on the project, I may or may not fill out all the sections. Sometimes I’ll just hop to the Organize section and jot down the order in which I think actions need to be accomplished. When I determine the Next Action, I put my cursor on the bullet item and press Ctrl+Shift+5 to create the task in Outlook.
   
3. As I complete Actions for the project, I may come up with information, links, notes and so forth that are related to the project. This is Project Support Material (PSM). This information generally gets captured in my OneNote inbox. I then move these pages into the Projects folder. I then go to the Projects folder and organize this PSM as sub-pages of the main Project page. Here’s how:I start out with something that looks like this. Several pages at the bottom of the Projects list that are PSM for a particular project. I move these underneath the appropriate project. I then click and drag slightly to the right. This makes the page a sub-page of the Project page. You’ll see a slight indentation like so:
   

   Now that these pages are sub-pages of the Music Sharing project, you can collapse and expand them by clicking the small arrow to the right of the page tab.
   

   I then collapse the PSM for all my projects, and this gives me my Project List. No need to keep a separate page of a bulleted project list. No need to keep separate PSM in a different area, I can simply collapse it to get it out of the way, or expand it when I need it. You can easily see what pages have PSM by looking at the page tab. It appears as if it’s stacked on top of other pages.
   

4. As I review my projects and see my progress, I can check the Actions as complete directly within OneNote. Simply click the red flag and it will change to a check mark. It will subsequently be removed in Outlook as well.
    

What about PSM that isn’t in OneNote?

Often times as we progress through our projects we gather information from various sources. This could be print material, emails, or files and documents in our file folders on our computer. Let’s see how we can organize this information so that we always know where it is. I take more of an implied approach, so I don’t need to write down where something is, or provide a link to it, I simply design the system for cohesion.

1. Print Material – I create a manila folder (or multiple ones) with the project name on it. If it’s an important project I’m spending frequent amounts of time on, this is generally within arms reach in a section on my desk. If it’s less frequently accessed, I don’t hesitate to alphabetically file it in my general reference system. Since I know the project name by looking at my projects list, as long as I know my alphabet, I can find the PSM.
2. Emails – If the email is a frequently used form of communication on my project, I create a separate folder in Outlook for it. If it is less frequently used, I use the Send to OneNote feature in Outlook to stick a copy of the email in my OneNote PSM.
3. Electronic Documents and Files – If the files and documents are numerous, I create a separate folder for these. What makes them easy to find however, is that my file system mirrors my OneNote setup. Let me show you what I mean.
   In the My Documents folder, I have a folder called @GTD, and in that folder I have a folder called Projects. If I encounter a project with multiple files, I create a new folder with the project name and store the files in there. Now I don’t need to link to these files to remember where they are, I just know my file system looks exactly like my OneNote setup.

   Now, if the files and documents are less frequent, or perhaps I want to provide some notated context to them, I copy them into OneNote. Yes, OneNote can link to or even have files embedded directly within pages. If you want to know more about this, check out Part Four on Collection using OneNote.

A Note on Reference Material

David Allen suggests that with our physical file folder system that we get comfortable and avoid the hesitation to create a file folder for a single piece of paper. I use this same method in OneNote with my General Reference system. If I don’t have a specific place for it in one of my more specialized reference notebooks, I put it in the General Reference notebook, even if it’s just a page with one line on it. OneNote makes it easy to organize and re-organize as our information grows.

This wraps up the post on Processing and Organizing using OneNote. Thanks for reading and happy GTD’ing!

Table of Contents: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010

Table of Contents: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010

In Part 4 of the GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 Series, we covered how we utilize Outlook and OneNote 2010 to collect all of our digital stuff, thoughts and ideas. We didn’t worry or bother to determine what we did with that stuff, we just focused on capturing.

Now, capturing is great and our Outlook/OneNote combo empowers us to do so quite efficiently, however, all that stuff is not as useful until we look at each item and determine what we should do with it. As David Allen teaches, processing doesn’t necessarily mean we are “doing” all the actions. It simply means that we take the time to identify what each item is and what it means, then decide what we are going to “do” with each item.

In my opinion, processing and organizing goes hand-in-hand, therefore I have combined these into one post. Since we are spending the time to look at each piece of information, why not organize it into our trusted system while we are at it?

This post will focus on Processing and Organizing our Outlook 2010 Inbox. The way we interact with Outlook and OneNote in our GTD system is very integrated and we switch between the two frequently, but quite honestly the posts would be far too long to combine the two, so I’ve split them up.

With our Outlook and OneNote setup, we have a couple buckets to process. We will affectionately refer to these both as our “inboxes”. If you didn’t catch how to setup Outlook and OneNote, refer to Parts Two and Three of the series.

Before we get started, let’s get an idea of what we’ll actually be doing when we process our Outlook Inbox. The diagram below covers how we’ll be handling each item we come across once we identify what it is and what it means to us.

Now that we have a good idea of what we’ll be doing when we process, let’s get started.

Processing and Organizing Our

Outlook 2010 Inbox

The idea here is to look at each item, decide what we should do with it, then organize it appropriately. The end result is that no email should be left in your inbox. The inbox is merely just a collection bucket. An empty inbox signifies that we have looked at every single last piece of email and made a decision on what we should do with it.

If it’s trash…

Push the delete key…simple as that.

If there is no action…

Not every email that arrives in our inbox is actionable. For these items, we can do two things with them:

1. File as Reference

Simple…you can click and drag to the appropriate folder in Outlook. Or if buttons tickle your fancy, try this approach. On the Home tab of the Ribbon, select the Move button. Outlook populates the Move list with recent folders you have moved items to. One stop shopping for filing!

Anticipate a long thread of emails hitting your inbox for a particular conversation you already know you’ll just be filing for reference? Try the Always Move Messages in This Conversation… option of the Move button. How do you feel about Outlook doing all your Processing/Organizing work for you lazy bones? Feels pretty good!

Now, filing in Outlook folders is obviously contingent on the fact that you have set up a reference folder system in Outlook already. If not you’ll pretty much just have a Trash can to file things (who knows, it may work for some!) I have moved from a very complex nested folder structure to a simple system, and the reason I do this is because Outlook Search and Indexing is so dang good. Try going to any folder and typing a word or two that you think might be contained in the subject or email body, or a name of a person or persons in the To/Cc lines and watch the emails get narrowed down instantly.
 

Not to mention Outlook’s sorting, as well as Outlook’s Search Folders. Explore these options and you may find if you have a complex folder structure, you’ll be able to simplify it quite a bit, and still be confident you can quickly sort, filter and ultimately find a specific email or thread in an ever-growing sea of electronic conversations.

Now, sometimes you’ll want to file items as reference, but maybe you would rather keep it in OneNote, say with all your Project Support Material or it makes more sense to file this information in your OneNote reference. Simply hit the OneNote button, also found in the Move category of the Home tab.
 

2. Incubate It

Eventually you’ll come across an email that doesn’t call for any action now, but may call for action in the near future and we’d like to be reminded of it, or it may simply be something that we’d like to do only if we had the time. We can do a couple of things with these type of items. We can stick them on a Someday/Maybe list if someday we maybe can get around to it, or we can put them on our calendar or in a “tickler” file to be reminded of it at a later date.

I have a Someday/Maybe section in OneNote, which we covered in Part Three of the series. It looks like this and it tracks everything I’d like to accomplish someday:

That’s well and fine, but I also keep a Someday/Maybe context in Outlook. These are email items or tasks and it helps me to track these items in Outlook because they have some context already and I can set a reminder sometime in the future if I wish. For instance, let’s say I receive an email for a training event coming up in a month’s time. I don’t know if I can attend now, but I’d like to if I have time. Since all the training details are contained within the email, it makes sense to keep it on the Someday/Maybe list in Outlook and I can easily set a reminder a couple weeks before that says “hey, do you still want to take this training?”

I tend to not put things on my calendar simply for reminders, because I reserve my calendar for my “hard landscape”, in other words my actions and commitments that need to be completed on a certain date or at a specific time. Instead I use the Add Reminder feature as a “tickler” for when I need to address my incubated item in the future. I’ll cover the Add Reminder feature when we talk about Actions later on in this post…or right now!

If there is an action…

So what if this item does have an action? We basically have three options:

Do It

If it takes less than two minutes, just do it. Reply to the email, or complete the action associated with the item or task. Once completed, delete it or file it as reference.

Delegate It

This is by far my favorite. Usually when we delegate we are communicating this to a person or team via email, IM, phone or in person. The problem arises when we are tracking these multiple delegated items, their status and when we should check up on them. Here’s what I do:

1. Once I delegate an item via email, I go into my Sent Items and flag it as a task and categorize it with the @Waiting For context.
2. If I know I need to follow up on the status at a certain time and would like to be reminded of this, I set a Reminder for a future date/time.
3. Once the delegated task is completed, I simply check it off my list.

Don’t worry, I’ll show you how to do this and more in the very next section

Defer It

This is probably where the bulk of our actions are going to land. Unfortunately not everything takes less than two minutes to complete, but these are actions that we want to complete “as soon as possible”. Since our goal is to get our inbox to zero, we must organize these actions appropriately.

If you haven’t done so already, head back to Part Two and set up some Categories for your Next Action contexts. Here’s how I approach flagging and organizing my Next Actions in Outlook:

1. Flag the email as a task -  I first flag the item so it appears in my task list simply by clicking the flag icon on the email or item so that it appears red as shown below:
    
2. Categorize the task – I then categorize the task with the appropriate Next Action context in the task list. It initially appears with a Category of (none). Assign it the correct category by clicking the Categories button in the Tags section of the Ribbon.
    
3. Name the task – When you flag an email as a task, the default task name becomes the subject of the email. 99% of the time this doesn’t describe the next action very well. Since our purpose with defining next actions is to determine the very next physical step that needs to be taken, figure out what that is and rename that not so descriptive email subject.To do this, head to the To Do bar, right click the task and select Rename Task.
   

   You can also rename tasks by using this little trick. Instead of right clicking the task, click it once to select it. Then click one more time (slower than a double click) and the task will become editable and allow you to rename it. Neato!

4. Add a Reminder – If I need to be reminded of an action sometime in the near future, or if I need to set a hard date/time for completing it, I add a reminder. In the task pane, find the task, right click it, go to Follow Up –> Add Reminder.
   Then make sure the Reminder check box is selected, set your date and time in the future that you want to be reminded and click OK. Now you’ll be reminded in Outlook at the specific date and time just as you would with a Calendar reminder.
   
5. Move the message out of the inbox – This is critical to our inbox being empty. The only reason we shouldn’t move a message or item out of our Inbox is if we haven’t decided what to do with it yet. As long as we follow the GTD workflow for processing, and trust our system, we should be able to file it, incubate it, or if there is an action – do it, defer it, delegate it. Since the message or item is flagged and categorized, I now trust that I have a running list of the things that need to get done. I don’t care where that message is located in my reference system, all I have to do is double click the task in the To-Do bar to bring the item into view.

Using Our Calendar

I mentioned earlier I only use my calendar as my “hard landscape”. I don’t set reminders for action items or someday/maybe’s through here, because Outlook has the Add Reminder functionality so I don’t need to crowd my calendar with commitments as well as random reminders. That’d just be too confusing for my wee brain to handle.

When working with the Calendar, there are several scenarios we typically come across.

1. Someone else scheduled a meeting – These show up in Outlook and you can accept, decline and send a tentative response.
2. We initiate a meeting with other parties – These aren’t something you stick in your Next Actions. They have a specific time, date and location.
3. We have a commitment that originates outside of Outlook – Stick these on your calendar as well. It often helps to change that 15 minute default reminder to an hour, a day, a week or more. For birthdays and social events, I usually set a reminder one to two weeks in advance especially if there is anything I need to purchase or prepare for in advance.
4. We want to allocate time to work on a next action or project – Sometimes in order to get focus on a certain task or project, we need to set some hard commitments with ourselves to spend the necessary time on them. With Outlook, head to the Calendar view. Determine an appropriate day and time, and click and drag the Next Action from the To Do bar over to the calendar. To allocate more or less time, you can either edit the calendar item, or click and drag the allocation handles down to specify a larger block of time.
   

What if I’ve determined there are multiple actions that require a project?

Don’t fret. Add that very next action to the Outlook To Do bar, then head over to OneNote and create a project page in your Projects section. Quickly jot down other “next-next actions” and brainstorm any other ideas associated with your project. We’ll definitely cover this in more detail in an upcoming post.

Our Inbox is Empty!…Right?

Now that we have an empty inbox, we’re feeling good about organizing and identifying next actions for all our email and Outlook items. The next step is to move over to OneNote and get our Inbox section processed and organized. We’ll cover OneNote in the next post. Thanks for reading and see you there!

Table of Contents: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010

In Part 3 of the GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 Series, we setup OneNote to work with GTD. Now that we have Outlook and OneNote setup, we can begin using our GTD system. With GTD, the very first thing we must be able to do is capture and record all of our inputs. We’ll eventually process these inputs and decide what to do with them, but for now we’ll focus on making sure we understand the tools and features that allow us to capture all the information that we come across each and every day.

A brief note on Outlook as a GTD capture device

I don’t really look at Outlook as a capture device per say. As it pertains to collecting our stuff, Outlook is simply a bucket, or an Inbox for gathering our email. It plays a much larger role in other steps in the GTD process, but not for capturing.

What it is good at is corralling our email. All my email gets sent straight to my Inbox for processing later. Since that’s about all it does in the collection process, we’ll spend the majority of our time focusing on OneNote and how it can help us capture and collect all of our “digital stuff.”

Without further ado…

The single greatest life altering OneNote feature ever

Ok, maybe I’m exaggerating a bit. But seriously, if you aren’t using this feature today, you’ll want to after seeing just how cool it is. I’m talking about the Docked OneNote feature. What it does is dock OneNote to the right side of your screen along side other applications such as web browsers, Word, PowerPoint, etc. You can take notes while still being able to view the content in the other applications. And best of all, OneNote automatically creates hyperlinks that point back to the web page or application you were viewing at the time. Let’s give it a try.

In OneNote 2010, click the Dock to Desktop button in the Quick Access toolbar in the top left corner. You can also use the shortcut Ctrl + Alt + D.
 

OneNote docks itself to the right hand side of your screen in a narrow format. The rest of your application windows automatically adjust in size, and text in the Docked OneNote window automatically wraps so you don’t have to scroll side to side. Want to stop taking linked notes and return to good ‘ol regular OneNote? No problem, just click the Dock to Desktop button again or push Ctrl + Alt + D to restore OneNote to the normal view.

But we don’t want to stop now do we? Let’s try taking some notes…but not just any notes. Linked Notes! Linked Notes is the feature that enables us to take notes that link back to the content we are viewing in our applications. You’ll want to make sure Linked Notes are enabled by clicking the Linked Notes icon in the left corner of the OneNote content area. You can enable Linked Notes by selecting Start Taking Linked Notes or disable Linked Notes by selecting Stop Taking Linked Notes. You can enable and disable any time you like while OneNote is docked.

Since you are already in a web browser if you are reading this, place your cursor in the OneNote window to start typing. Here I’ve taken some notes on a forum I visited. Simply by having the web browser page active and typing notes in OneNote, I’ve created a reference back to the website I was viewing. Hover over the text in OneNote which will show an icon of the application the notes are linking to. Click the icon to be taken to the web page.

Cool, huh? Now try this with another application such as Word or PowerPoint. Clicking the linked note should take you to the exact page or PowerPoint slide you were viewing when you typed the note.

Tip! There’s a Linked Notes in OneNote button on the Review tab of the ribbon in Word, PowerPoint and Internet Explorer which gives you another option to start taking Linked Notes.

Note on Application Compatibility: Linked Notes do not work with every application. You’ll know that it works when a small icon appears to the left of your note. If you try taking linked notes in Outlook, Excel or Adobe Reader for instance, no icon will appear, signifying that these applications aren’t supported for taking linked notes.

Now, if you want to pass this linked note on to a friend in an email, it doesn’t appear to be that easy to extract the hyperlink out, but it quite simple in fact. Right click the link icon for the note, and select Copy Link. You can paste this into an email now that it is available as a URL.

Capturing Everything

Docked OneNote and Linked Notes are awesome, however there are a plethora of ways to capture information with OneNote. We’ll cover many of these ways and how they can help us corral our digital “stuff”.

Make sure you have OneNote setup to send all of your “stuff” to your Inbox section. That way we can work on capturing things at light speed instead of being caught up in the act of processing and organizing everything we capture. Visit Part 3 of the GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 Series if you need help setting up OneNote for our GTD system.

From Outlook

Meeting Details – Capture meeting notes with context, without leaving OneNote!

In OneNote, create a new page in your inbox, then click Meeting Details in the Outlook section of the Home ribbon. Choose a meeting for the current day.

Or choose a meeting from another day by selecting Choose a Meeting from Another Day… and selecting the day and meeting of your choice. Click Insert Details to insert the meeting into OneNote.

Sending to OneNote – Take notes, keep as reference, and bring the attachments over too!

In Outlook, select an email to view in the reading pane, or open an email in a separate window. Go to the Move section of the Home tab (or the Message tab if you have the message open in a separate window) and select the Send to OneNote button. The message magically appears in your OneNote Inbox section.

Now try it with a message that has an attachment. You guessed it, the attachment comes along with it and can now be opened from OneNote.

Want just the attachment from the message? We can do that too! Right click the attachment and choose Copy or select the attachment and press Ctrl + C. Then step over to OneNote, select the page you want to paste the attachment to, and select the Paste button from the Home tab on the ribbon or press Ctrl + V.

You can either choose to copy the file onto the page, which will display an icon that you can double-click to open, or you can insert the file as a printout so you can notate it directly within OneNote. Cool!

Linked Notes from Outlook – Linking is the bees knees!

Remember our Linked Notes topic from above? Well we aren’t done with Linked Notes quite yet. We can also send Calendar items, Contacts and Tasks to OneNote and the OneNote pages will automatically link back to the Outlook item we sent to OneNote. Let’s see how it works.

In Outlook, select a Contact, select a Task (either from the Tasks screens or the To Do bar) or select a Calendar item (either from the Calendar screen or the To Do bar) and then click the Linked Notes button in the Actions section of the ribbon (If it’s a calendar item, the button is on the Appointment tab of the ribbon).

Back in OneNote, we see that a new page has been created in our Inbox. This page has a hyperlink called Link to OneNote item. Click this hyperlink to open the Outlook item you originally sent to OneNote.

From Internet Explorer

Send to OneNote

Ever want to capture an entire webpage in all it’s glory so you can take notes, reference or read it offline? All you have to do is click the Send to OneNote button and the web page will be sent to a new OneNote page in your Inbox. Now, you may be wondering…where the heck is this button anyway? By default in IE 8, it’s usually hidden because it’s an extra icon that just won’t fit on the toolbar. Access it by clicking on the fly out arrow to the right.

Feel like this is too hard to get to? You have a couple of options. You can either unlock the toolbars and drag out the toolbar to include these icons, which will give less room to your tabs….

Right click on the toolbars, choose Lock the Toolbars (which deselects the option and really unlocks them). Then grab the handle for the Toolbar and drag it to the left until the OneNote icons appear. Then right click and choose Lock the Toolbars.
 

You also have the option of customizing the toolbar and moving the OneNote buttons up in the order, so they appear first. Right-click the toolbar and choose Customize –> Add or Remove Commands… Then select the OneNote buttons and click the Move Up button until they are in a position of your choice. Click Close to finish.

Copy and Paste – Old and Faithful!

Yep, we can still copy and paste text, pictures and hyperlinks from IE. Give it a try and you’ll notice that at the bottom of the pasted information you’ll see a hyperlink reference back to the page you copied the information from. It’s very useful if you want to copy an excerpt or certain element from a page, but would still like to know where it originated from.

All the other stuff

Screen clippings

Hit the Windows + S keys to take a screen clipping of anything on your screen. This will automatically get sent to a new page in your Inbox section. Just make sure your OneNote icon is in the tray or the Windows + S key combo won’t work!

Print to OneNote

Any application that has print capabilities can print right into OneNote. Try it out. Open up a PDF in Adobe Reader as an example. Go to Print your PDF document, and instead of printing to your normal printer, select the Send to OneNote 2010 printer. You can print all the pages or just a range of pages and these will be sent directly to your Inbox section in OneNote. Neato!

Scan to OneNote

Yes, you can scan too! Click the Insert tab on the ribbon and select the Scanner Printout button. If you have a scanner connected, your scanning software will launch and allow you to scan directly into OneNote.

Record Audio

Too lazy to type or want to record some audio? It’s easy to capture audio directly to OneNote. Head over to the Insert tab on the ribbon and click Record Audio which will begin recording right away in the page you have selected, or right click your OneNote icon and choose Start Recording Audio. This will pop up a side note and place the audio on a new page within your OneNote Inbox section. You can pause or stop your recordings, and play them back when they are finished. Best of all, you can take notes on them!
 
 

Attach Files and File Printouts

You can attach files and file printouts which we briefly covered in the Outlook section earlier in this post. Attaching files is often useful when we want to take some notes on the file, but don’t want to embed them within the file, or remember where the file is in our file system.

Go to the Insert tab on the ribbon and choose Attach File. Browse and select the file you want to attach and select Insert. Or better yet, simply drag and drop the file into OneNote from Windows Explorer!

You can also attach a file printout from within OneNote. On the Insert tab, choose File Printout. Browse and select the file you want to insert as a printout and it will be inserted into OneNote. It looks sort of like one long image, but the cool thing about it is that the text within the printout is fully searchable within OneNote. Super sweet!

Insert Pictures

Of course you can insert pictures! There’s a few ways of doing it. You can copy and paste from a web browser, you can drag and drop the picture file as shown above in the “Attach Files and File Printouts” section, or you can click the Picture button on the Insert tab and select your picture, then click Open.

Collecting your thoughts

In closing, I hope this post shows you some of the many ways we can capture information and bring it into OneNote. The idea is that we spend less time worrying about how to capture the information, less time about what exactly we do with that information, and more time on simply capturing and collecting all the stuff that is important or of interest to us.

Coming up…

In our next post in the series, we’ll cover how to process all of the information we gather throughout the day.

Thank you for reading and please feel free to post your comments or thoughts. They are much appreciated!

Table of Contents: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010

In Part 2 of the GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 Series, I covered how to setup Outlook 2010 for the GTD system. OneNote 2010 is going to be our central hub for collecting and organizing our information. Here’s how to setup OneNote.

By default our OneNote layout looks as such. As you can see, the Navigation bar is collapsed on the left, and the page tabs are on the right.

Our GTD system will work best with a more fluid layout. We’re going to expand our Navigation bar so we can more easily navigate our notebooks, and we’ll move the page tabs over to the left so our all of our navigation is in one place. We don’t have to move the mouse to opposite ends of the landscape as we navigate through OneNote.

Click the purple File tab at the top left corner to open the Office Backstage view. Select Options.

Next, click the Display tab and select the Page tabs appear on the left checkbox. Click OK.

Finally, click the right arrow on the Navigation Bar to expand the Navigation area to show Notebooks, sections and pages.

Now we are looking good!

Set up your notebooks

How you setup your GTD system is purely subjective and will differ by individual. I’ve tweaked my OneNote setup little by little to come up with what I have today, and this works for me. I’ll detail how and why I organize mine the way I do which at the very least will give you some idea as to the organizational flexibility of OneNote. My setup works for me for one reason alone. I TRUST IT. I trust it because it’s simple for me to understand, and therefore, it’s easy for me to use. Don’t be afraid to refine OneNote here and there until you can fully trust and use your system.

I start off by creating two separate notebooks (Go to File –> New to create a notebook). I name these notebooks:

• GTD – A notebook for capturing, and referencing all my lists (projects, read/review, someday/maybe, etc.)
• Reference – A notebook to organize all my reference material

GTD Notebook

In my GTD notebook, I create the following sections:

• Inbox – A section devoted to capturing information. I capture mounds of information daily without worrying about organizing it while capturing. Everything goes to the inbox. A single page or multiple pages, doesn’t matter. Same concept as a physical inbox, an email inbox, and of course, it’s a capture device.
• Projects – A section where I keep all my projects. Project Support Material (PSM) goes here as well, and I’ll explain later how I organize this.
• Lists – A section for me to keep lists that I review regularly. This could be an ad-hoc list or something I review daily. For example, I have a weekly review checklist of everything I need to process, and I have a goals list of my key areas I like to focus on in my personal and professional development.
• Read – Review – Usually weblinks, emails sent from Outlook, or other online material. Perodicals/news clippings generally go in a physical file, and books I want to read go on my someday/maybe lists.
• Someday – Maybe – Someday/Maybe lists and brainstorming for anything I might want to do someday.
• Page Templates – OneNote offers the ability to save layouts of pages for easy creation. I create basic project templates and daily notes templates. I’ll cover how to create these in a bit.

Reference Notebook

In my Reference notebook, I create the following section:

• Personal – This section holds all my personal information like passwords, license keys, employer information, etc. I password protect this section by right clicking the section and choosing Password Protect This Section…
  

In the Reference notebook, I then create some section groups, and additional sections within those section groups. If you aren’t familiar with section groups, they are basically sections that can hold, or nest other sections. To create a new section group, right click on an empty space in the Section bar and choose New Section Group.

I create the following section groups (bold bullet points) and sections within those section groups (sub-bullet points).

• 1 – General Reference
  • A – F
  • G – M
  • N – S
  • T – Z
• 2 – Technology Reference
  • A – F
  • G – M
  • N – S
  • T – Z

The General Reference section is for anything that isn’t technology related. Since my major focus at work is technology, and technology happens to be a hobby of mine, I have a separate section for Technology. If you were a graphic designer, you may have a reference section for Graphic Design. Create additional reference sections for reference material that is very focused, or has a large amount of information that may not fit in a general reference.

I also create a separate Work notebook, which is also reference, but contains reference material for each project I work on.

You may be wondering why there are sub-sections in the Reference section groups for A – F, G – M, etc. First, the easiest way for me to file in OneNote is to replicate how I file in my paper-based system. Alphabetically. I also find that it is easier to file and sort in sections that break up my information into more manageable sub-sections. Granted, OneNote makes it very easy to search content across pages, sections and notebooks, but it makes it easier nonetheless.

These sub-sections may not be necessary when the SortPages OneNote PowerToy gets updated for OneNote 2010. Until then it’s a tad difficult to organize pages alphabetically.

Overall, here’s how the setup looks:

Sending information to your inbox

One of the most powerful features of OneNote is it’s ability to capture information in many different ways. At the most basic level, it’s a text editor. You also have the ability to capture information from Outlook, Internet Explorer, take screen clippings, audio recordings, and that’s just scratching the surface. For more information, see the OneNote 2010 Guide notebook that is created when installing OneNote.

With the numerous different ways of capturing information, it would be nice if we could dump all this information in our Inbox so we can process and organize it later. Well, we’re in luck because there is indeed a way to do this.

Go to File –> Options. Select Save & Backup. Click the Unfiled Notes Section and select Modify. Navigate to the GTD folder (in Documents\OneNote Notebooks by default) and choose the Inbox.one section. Then click Open.
 

While still in the Options screen, select the Send to OneNote tab. By default, when you send content to OneNote from Outlook, IE or another program, a dialog box will prompt you for a location in OneNote to place the content. Since we are implementing GTD, we are going to make it as easy as possible to capture information, knowing that later we will be processing and organizing it.

For Email messages, select the drop-down menu and choose Set default location… In the dialog box that appears, select Inbox in the GTD Notebook and click OK. Repeat this step for all the remaining items in the Outlook Items area and the Other Content area. Click OK to save the settings.

Setting up page templates

Now we want to setup some page templates so when we are creating new pages to capture our daily notes, or setting up a new project, we save ourselves some time and also implement a bit of structure for our pages.

Page templates are quite easy to create. You will basically create a new page, make some content and format it to your liking, and then save it as a template which can be reused over and over.

First, navigate to the Page Templates section and create a new page. You’ll want to create a framework for your template, and you can use some tools to help you out. New in OneNote 2010 is text styles. These allow you to very quickly create some headings. Type some text, highlight, and the select the style of your choice from the Styles section of the ribbon:

You can also create lines and shapes to help divide or group the content on your pages. Insert a line or shape by going to the Draw ribbon and selecting from shapes in the Insert Shapes Section.

I’ve created the following pages. You can use these for ideas, or create your own.

Daily Notes and Links	Simple Project	Detailed Project

Once your page is setup how you want it, click the down arrow to the right of the New Page button and select Page Templates…
 

On the Template pane to the right, select Save current page as a template hyperlink at the bottom. In the Save As Template dialog, type a name for the template and click Save.

Now when you want to use the newly created template, you can open the Page Templates pane and select your templates from the My Templates section.

Once you create a page from a template, you should be able to select it from the drop-down menu on the New Page button.

The Closer

That rounds out the setup for OneNote. As you may notice, there isn’t really anything fancy. Tags aren’t used in my system as they are in other GTD systems. I love them and find them very valuable, but haven’t found a need to use them yet.

Stay tuned as we continue on to using our newly setup GTD system based on Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010. We’ll dig in to how we collect, process and organize all of our information using this software to help implement the GTD methodology. Thanks for reading!

Table of Contents: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010

In Part 1 of the GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 Series, I covered the high level overview of my GTD system. This post will focus on getting Outlook 2010 setup appropriately so you can start processing, organizing and doing with Outlook and OneNote.

GTD Next Action Contexts – Using Outlook Categories

The first thing we’ll cover is setting up our Next Action contexts. In the GTD methodology, contexts are used to break up our Next Actions into distinct areas where we actually “do” our Next Actions, such as @Computer, @Home, @Phone, etc. In Outlook, we can use the Categories feature (introduced in Outlook 2007) to break our Next Actions up into these contexts. It’s very easy to customize Categories, and here’s how to do it.

Start by clicking the Categories button in the Tags section of the Outlook ribbon. Select All Categories… from the drop down menu.

Unless you have customized these previously, your Categories will be populated with quite a few pre-created categories. These work for some, but what I end up doing is deleting all of them. Yes, ALL OF THEM. But don’t worry, we’ll create our own custom categories and we’ll always have the option of refining these later by creating new categories, modifying them or deleting them.

Here’s what my Categories looks like. You’ll notice I have two distinct groupings; Those that start with the @ symbol and those that start with “Contacts’”. I like to categorize my contacts, and if you do to, feel free to create some Contact categories. However, right now, we are focusing on our Next Action categories, and you guessed it, these start with the @ symbol.

Now, you’ve seen my Categories, and these work for me. One of the great things about GTD is it’s flexibility to fit an individual, and you can create different categories to fit your individual needs. I personally like to keep mine as simple as possible, and I’ve narrowed mine down to a set that fits my needs pretty well.

Let’s get into how to create our categories!

If you are like me, you’ll want to start with a clean slate. You can skip this step if you are apprehensive about deleting anything, and go watch an episode of Hoarders…maybe you have some electronic hoarding tendencies…just kidding. There is no bulk way of going about this, so select a category, click the Delete button and confirm the deletion by pressing the OK button in the dialog box that pops up.

It’s ok, these can always be created again!

Once you have a clean slate, let’s get started creating our Categories to match our GTD contexts. To create a category, click the New… button, type a name for the category (I like to begin mine with the @ symbol, which keeps them at the top if I have other categories listed.

Next, select your favorite color (chartreuse, periwinkle, gray…). You also have the option of assigning a shortcut key from CTRL + F2 to CTRL+ F12. If you find this makes you more productive and you don’t like using the mouse if you don’t have to, then these shortcuts are for you. Click OK when you are done.

Alright, first category down. Repeat the steps above to create the rest of your categories. Remember these categories represent your Next Action contexts. You may already have context that you use, or you may be starting out for the first time. If you are starting out for the first time, my suggestion is to start simple. More contexts can always be included in your system as you refine it and fit it to your liking.

Get Your Next Actions Where You Can See Them

With this GTD implementation, Next Actions are created, reviewed, organized and completed in Outlook 2010. One of the key features that help us with these tasks was introduced back in Outlook 2007 and is called the Outlook To-Do bar. Folks, if you haven’t been introduced to the To-Do bar, then allow me. To-Do bar, folks, folks, this is To-Do bar.

As you can see to our right, the To-Do bar shows upcoming calendar appointments on top, and tasks arranged by categories beneath the appointments. Now, before you ask, I’m sure my To-Do bar looks a tad different than yours, or isn’t shown at all. That’s ok, because I’m going to show how to modify your layout to show the To-Do bar, and customize the To-Do bar to your liking.

First, the To-Do bar isn’t any good if we can’t see it. So to get this bad-boy out in the limelight, let’s do the following. First, go to the ribbon up top (where all the fancy icons are) and choose the View tab. In the Layout section, select to To-Do bar drop-down button and make sure the Normal option is selected. Now we have our To-Do bar front and center…err…right.

Now, the default To-Do bar is a bit too busy for my tastes. It comes by default with a mini calendar called the Date Navigator which I don’t find all that useful personally. I like to simplify my interface, giving the most room for my appointments, or hard-landscape, and my Next Actions (categorized tasks). To customize what is displayed on the To-Do bar, head back to the View tab, click the To-Do bar drop-down menu and check or uncheck any of the following options:

• Date Navigator
• Appointments
• Task List
• Quick Contacts

Ok, now we have our To-Do bar customized, we have one last step to make sure it’s displaying correctly for our GTD system.

The To-Do bar may organize your tasks by start-date or due-date by default. This isn’t the best sorting option for our GTD system, so we’ll organize it by Categories. This breaks our Next Actions into the proper contexts we’ve assigned them. Our in strict Outlook speak, this sorts our To-Do items (tasks, flagged mail, etc.) by category.

To do so, click on the left column header in the To-Do bar and select the option for Categories. It’s magical.

Wrappin’ It Up

Ok, I’ve covered the basic setup for getting Outlook ready for Getting Things Done. I have a few more advanced setup tricks to cover and I will detail these when we get to processing our inbox in an upcoming post…aren’t you excited? Before I go, I want you to think for a moment about how you organize your mail.

We all in some way or another create a folder structure that works for us as individuals. This could be as simple as one folder for email we’ve read (some use the Trash) or as elaborate as complex nested groups of folders and sub-folders to organize and categorize our mail. When using Outlook with GTD, our folders are there for one thing. Keeping reference material. In many business environments, this could mean ALL mail is kept for compliance and audit trails, but it is still reference material (some day I may need this email…). I urge you to think about, or even rethink how you organize your email, and setup a system that works for you.

I’ve gone from a very complex system to a rather simple system, and this decision is primarily based on Outlook 2010 enhancements. The search and indexing features are phenomenal, so I find I don’t have to file email sent to me by a certain person, or about a certain subject. I can simply type in a word or two, maybe the sender’s name and what the email was about, and generally I can find the email I was looking for in a matter of seconds. A second feature, called search folders, allows me to setup pre-defined search criteria, and these folders are populated with email that meets the search criteria. Now I can dump the thousand emails for one project into a single project folder, and if I need to, use Search Folders to dynamically group mail as I see fit.

I’ll cover these features as we get into the processing and organizing posts, but for now, if you don’t have an organizational system for email, or you are thinking yours are too complex, keep in mind that simple is often better, and new features in Outlook only make it easier for you to file your email efficiently, and find it again quickly.

In the next post we’ll get OneNote setup for our system, so we can get busy and use our tools to actually DO stuff instead of reading ridiculously long-winded blog posts.

See you soon!

Table of Contents: GTD with Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010

Hey GTD’ers. There are several blogs out there that describe how to utilize Outlook and OneNote to implement the Getting Things Done methodology. The most popular of the bunch is a collection of posts over at 7Breaths that covers OneNote 2007 and briefs on it’s integration with Outlook 2007.

The release of Office 2010 brings quite a few neat features that can be used to make you more productive and organized if you currently use Outlook and OneNote or if you are just starting out with Getting Things Done.

This blog post will give a brief overview of my system, which pulls many ideas from the the 7Breaths implementation, and adds my own twists and ideas for making my system work for me.

I use Outlook 2010 and OneNote 2010 as the main tools for managing my GTD system. Since I spend most of my time at work on my computer, and the technologies I work with as an IT consultant are Microsoft centric, it makes sense for me to use an electronic GTD implementation with applications I’m familiar with and happen to love…isn’t that why we choose the GTD tools we do?

Keep in mind my system is not entirely electronic. I have physical inboxes, filing cabinets and notebooks at home, at work, and a portable system that fits in my laptop bag. Don’t forget one of the most important tools in any GTD system…the ubiquitous capture device. No technology here, just a small Moleskine reporter notebook I take with me everywhere.

Outlook 2010

Outlook is my central hub for collecting and organizing emails, tracking my “hard landscape”, and managing my Next Actions. The screenshot below shows a brief overview of where I spend most of my time, in the Mail view. This gives me the ability to process my inbox, organize my inputs, view my upcoming appointments and get a snapshot of my Next Actions.

Outlook is essentially used for the following workflows in the my GTD system:

I stumbled upon a blog the other day called 7Breaths with the tagline “Decide it. Do it.” This blog is focused on “Getting things done each day”, or just “Getting Things Done” (GTD for short). He started blogging about integrating GTD and OneNote back in 2007, which means I haven’t been “Getting things done” for a while now. Well, it’s time to start, and one of the things on my list is to blog more. Well, here it is!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with GTD, as I was, here’s a Wikipedia page you can read through. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Getting_Things_Done.

The blog author named Rob, has a great workflow he designed where he uses OneNote 2007 and it’s tight integration with Outlook 2007 to “GTD”. He has detailed this workflow in several sequential blog postings which can be found here. The thing that excited me most about this is I use OneNote 2007 to track all my notes. Also, I would consider my approach to productivity sub-par, and I’m always looking for ideas to streamline how I “GTD”. Integrating technology and productivity couldn’t be more exciting for me!

In addition to OneNote 2007, Outlook 2007 is used to manage appointments and projects. Additional blog postings on the subject can be found here.

In closing, for those of you that need a productivity boost and are looking for a tool to help with that, check 7Breaths out. If you are already as productive as can be, but want to learn a few OneNote 2007 tricks, and you deem this a worthy way to spend your time, then check out 7Breaths!

I know a lot of you out there are looking for a solid lab server to setup at home or in the office, and for a personal purchase, I would consider this a middle of the road purchase as far as cost/performance goes.

My journey started and was encouraged by a guy named Simon who runs the Techhead blog which I highly recommend you visit if you are looking into purchasing a virtualization lab server. (a big thanks to my buddy John M. for sending me the link for Techhead). Simon is a VMWare guy, and his blogs relating to HP ML series servers detail his experience with the ML110/ML115 models. Regardless of the virtualization solution/hypervisor you choose, he has a great deal of information on these ML series servers. And if you choose to go the VMWare ESX route, he will put your mind at ease that these servers will work perfectly with ESX.

If you are looking for a cheap server-class system with a warranty and the flexibility of being fully supported by VMWare, I highly recommend the ML110/ML115 servers. However, I needed a bit more ‘oomph’ and decided to go with the ML350 G5 which supports up to 32GB of RAM, two Quad-core processors and 8 SFF (small form factor [2.5”]) or 6 LFF drives.

For those of you wondering, the main reason I totally ruled out Dell’s PowerEdge 2900/2950 offerings was because of the extremely loud fans and initial startup costs associated with purchasing one of these servers. I’ve heard the fans are ridiculously loud on the PE line, where the ML350 is much quieter and geared for the open layout home/office scenario. In addition, some of you may like to build your system from the ground up. I didn’t choose that route because number one, I’m lazy, and number two, I liked the 3 year on site support offered with the machine I purchased.

Our budgets and needs all vary, but mine are capped right around the $2000.00 mark. I needed a server that supported a number of concurrent running VM’s, so I wanted to start out with a Quad-core processor, at least 16GB of RAM, and to be able to load up the server with some fast SAS disks (storage constraint is what I’ve found to be the #1 bottleneck in VM performance).

My purchases all came by way of EBay. I decided EBay was the most cost efficient route, especially with the server purchase. All items I purchased were through Buy It Now, and I went with reputable sellers with feedback above 99%. My purchasing experiences with all three sellers has been great. Prompt responses to questions, willing to negotiate on price/shipping, and very fast shipping. I got a slaying deal on the ML350 through  budgetservers. The price for this exact model on HP’s site is $1689.00. As you will see from my price breakdown below, I got the server for much cheaper.

Highlighting what I liked about the server, I found the most useful features to be:

1. A 2.33ghz Quad-core processor, with support for an additional Quad-core processor
2. Support for 32GB of RAM
3. E200i with 128MB of battery backed write cache RAID controller (Supports RAID 0, 1, 10, and 5)
4. Integrated Lights-Out port
5. VMWare ESX is fully supported

In addition to the server, I purchased the following:

1. 16GB of RAM (4x4GB buffered ECC)
2. 4 x 146.8GB Seagate Cheetah 15k.5 SAS drives

The server comes with 2GB of RAM pre-installed, so the additional RAM will bump me up to 18GB. I decided on the 15K RPM SAS drives because I got such a great deal on the lot of four. Otherwise I may have opted to go with four WD Caviar Black 7200RPM SATA2 drives. Aside from drawing twice as much power, I think I will enjoy the added I/O and throughput the SAS drives will give me in RAID-0. In case you are wondering why I’m choosing RAID-0, which provides no fault tolerance, in my home lab I don’t need much in the way of redundancy and don’t want to forfeit the IO overhead that RAID 10 or RAID 5 would impose. My 1TB SATA drive that the host will be running on can be partitioned to provide ample space for backing up my most important VM’s.

Here’s a price breakdown of the bits needed to assemble the server, along with links to the EBay items (if applicable).

More to come

I’m away from home for a bit, so I hope to make it back to assemble everything that has arrived. I have yet to decide between Hyper-V or ESX/VSphere, so my next posts will detail which I have decided on and what makes most sense for me. I also hope to provide some performance benchmarks as well as real-world results for you folks to give you an idea of what kind of performance you can expect out of a machine like this (I’m excited to find out myself). The one thing I find out there is a lot of specs on home servers, but not many results on what kind of performance they can expect from a particular setup. So I aim to give you guys one perspective based on the gear that I’ve assembled.

Until then, I hope this post has provided you with an interesting angle on building a home lab with server-class hardware for just over $1800.00. And like I mentioned previously, for much cheaper alternatives, check out the Techhead blog for information on the ML110/ML115 models.