Favorite Email Add-In: GTD

Note: There is an update to this post at Manage Email Overload with ClearContext

I’m providing some short-term consultating to a mediator working to grow her business. She’s currently selecting software to run some key aspects of her practice and the other day she asked me, What’s your favorite software?

Over the coming couple of weeks, I’m going to run a series of short articles that answer that question. I won’t focus on software you probably already know and about which much has been written–Internet browsers, word processing, financial programs or the like. Instead, I’ll write about some types of programs that are less familiar to many folks. They may not all be unfamiliar to you, of course. And while they may not all be the best choices for you, I’ll share the software I won’t do without and why that’s so.

In considering which software earns rights to inclusion on my favorites list, I decided to define “favorite” by these criteria:

• I use it very frequently—in some cases, multiple times daily.
• It makes something I do easier or more efficient.
• It has an interface that’s intuitive to me—I didn’t have to spend hours upon hours learning to use it
• It’s cost effective—the dollar cost has been returned to me in multiples as result of time savings or increases in income.

Favorite Email Enhancer: Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In

I use Microsoft Outlook to manage my email, calendar, client database, and to-do lists. I’ve tried other packages and just keep coming back to Outlook because it does it all in one interface that works for the way my brain works. But it was missing something. I wanted my project lists, clients lists and numerous emails associated with those to be more integrated and easier to locate quickly.

I experimented with Avidian Prophet and ACT!, and while they’re good at what they do, but I found them too powerful or cumbersome for my needs. And they weren’t quite providing the glue I was looking for. I tried Nelson Email Organizer (NEO) and liked it a great deal—but it required me to open it as a separate program outside of Outlook, which ended up as a deal-breaker for me.

Then I found the Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In. The add-in uses some of the key practices made famous by David Allens’ book, Getting Things Done. It helps me deal with the huge number of daily emails efficiently and effectively, connecting them easily to projects and subprojects, appointments, and task lists. It’s interface is simple—just a few buttons integrated into my Outlook toolbar so that I can winnow down my emails by dealing with them, delegating, assigning, deferring, or filing each of them in only a few minutes.

The GTD Outlook Add-In gave me the glue I was looking for, helped me stop cringing at the number of emails in my inbox, and put a system in place that made Outlook not just good, but great. And it doesn’t crash or cause my system to lock up. I suspect the software’s somewhat more intuitive to use if you’ve read the book, though the product website explains the concepts in a nice online tour.

Next up: My favorite news aggregator.