{"id":37,"date":"2009-06-27T13:04:35","date_gmt":"2009-06-27T19:04:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/?p=37"},"modified":"2009-06-27T13:04:35","modified_gmt":"2009-06-27T19:04:35","slug":"gtd-hacking-outlook-categories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/2009\/06\/gtd-hacking-outlook-categories\/","title":{"rendered":"GTD: Hacking Outlook Categories"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;ve said in a previous post, the 15 categories provided by the Palm Task manager are enough contexts for my GTD implementation.\u00a0 Except at work, where I sometimes use Outlook Tasks to assign work to other people, which I want to keep track of.<\/p>\n<p>Outlook allows multiple categories to be assigned to a Task.\u00a0 The Palm doesn&#8217;t support multiple categories, but with a little planning, that won&#8217;t matter.\u00a0 Outlook will always list multiple categories in a known order, and moves the first one back and forth to the Palm.\u00a0 My list of Next Action contexts (Palm and Outlook categories) includes<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>@Agenda<\/li>\n<li>@Computer<\/li>\n<li>@Home<\/li>\n<li>@Waiting For<\/li>\n<li>@Work<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I also keep my projects and someday\/maybe lists in Tasks, and separate them by home and work.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>^Projects-H<\/li>\n<li>^Projects-W<\/li>\n<li>Someday\/Maybe-H<\/li>\n<li>Someday\/Maybe-W<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Notice the non-alpha characters at the beginning of some categories.\u00a0 They keep the list sorted so that the ones I need most are at the top.\u00a0 They also mean that when multiple categories are assigned in Outlook, the funny character categories will be listed first.<\/p>\n<p>So if I have three team members I assign work to, Allan, Bob, and Charlie, I will create a category for each:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>w-Allan<\/li>\n<li>w-Bob<\/li>\n<li>w-Charlie<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>I also may create categories for ways I might want to retrieve data, for example by product:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>w-WhizBang1.0<\/li>\n<li>w-WhizBang1.1<\/li>\n<li>w-GeeWhiz3.7<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now I can create an Outlook Task for a project to add a feature to WhizBang 1.0, and assign it to Allan.\u00a0\u00a0 The Task might be titled <em>Add Super Sexy Feature to WhizBang<\/em> and be assigned to the ^Projects-W, w-WhizBang1.0, and w-Allan categories.<\/p>\n<p>On the Palm I&#8217;ll find <em>Add Super Sexy Feature to WhizBang<\/em> in my Tasks list in the ^Projects-W category, just where it should be.\u00a0 And on the Palm, I don&#8217;t see the w-WhizBang1.0 and w-Allan categories.<\/p>\n<p>In Outlook, I can order and filter my Tasks in many different ways.\u00a0 I usually use a view that groups by category.\u00a0 Now I can see <em>Add Super Sexy Feature to WhizBang<\/em> in my ^Projects-W list, and it also shows up under w-WhizBang1.0, so I can see all the projects currently under way for that product.\u00a0 And I can look at the w-Allan category to see what his workload is like.<\/p>\n<p>The trick to making this all work is to preface the &#8220;extra&#8221; work categories with a character that sorts alphabetically after all the Palm categories.\u00a0 For me, a w- (for work-) does the job.<\/p>\n<p>I try to do two reviews a week.\u00a0 One is primarily for work, and only visits the NA contexts that are applicable for work, and the work projects and someday\/maybe lists.\u00a0 The other is primarily for non-work, and usually does not include the work projects and someday\/maybe lists, but when it does, entries are there as they should be, because I make sure that every Task entered in Outlook has one of the categories assigned that matches a Palm category, and the sync manages to keep it all lined up correctly!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I&#8217;ve said in a previous post, the 15 categories provided by the Palm Task manager are enough contexts for my GTD implementation.\u00a0 Except at work, where I sometimes use Outlook Tasks to assign work to other people, which I want to keep track of. Outlook allows multiple categories to be assigned to a Task.\u00a0 [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=37"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37\/revisions\/82"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=37"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=37"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dennissherman.com\/dennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=37"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}