Workflow
Back in 2002 I switched to the Mac as my primary platform. As part of that switch I purchased Office v.X for Mac and immediately fell in love with Entourage. This love affair continued for some time with much happiness. Then, like a typical man, I decided that my old lover was no longer adequate, because it wasn’t compatible with Tiger’s spotlight. That functionality came later of course, but I was already using Mail.app pretty regularly by then.
So I didn’t go back. Then, some time late last year, I bought Getting Things Done by David Allen. (Great, Amazing, Life changing book by the way, pick it up and apply it) Since that time, I have spent a lot of time with different programs, Kinkless GTD was my first attempt at applying my the GTD methodology, this went ok, but it wasn’t overly impressive. Don’t get me wrong, it helped me a ton to understand and apply the concepts of GTD. Next I switch to iGTD. It was a bit cleaner and has some nice improvements over Kinkless. Then, Leopard arrived.
Leopard is great, wonderful, awesome! I don’t want anyone to think I’m not a fan of Leopard. The transparent menu bar doesn’t bother me (I really don’t know what all the fuss is about) and I really like the look of the new dock. But I digress, this isn’t about Leopard, though the big cat does play a bit of a part in this story. The reason is, because, Leopard broke some things. Specifically, it broke iGTD. I tried to go back to Kinkless, no go either. The reason? Because the nice kitty cat has a new iCal and with it, some of the the things that sync up with iCal use Applescript and the Applescript dictionary has changed, and with it, everything breaks.
So, what I did, was go back to my old love, Entourage. There are issues, namely related to running Office 2004 for Mac on an Intel Mac when it was built for a PowerPC Mac (AKA: Rosetta) and the fact that it’s almost 4 year old software. But the fact is that it’s working. I have discovered it’s really easy to apply GTD in Entourage. I’m finding I like it better. It’s almost like Entourage was built with GTD in mind. I have it setup so that I use my Categories as my Contexts and Projects as… well, Projects. Entourage has internal scripts to turn email messages into Tasks, Appointments, or Notes. Then you have the fact that you can make a view based on all kinds of Rules. My “Inbox” for items is just basically a “Smart View” that I have setup that only lists items with no Project and/or no Category assigned. It works beautifully. All the things that Kinkless, iGTD and OmniFocus try to get you to Entourage basically already can do built in. I feel like everything is organized. Especially with the Projects. projects in Entourage are simply AMAZING. You can link to Finder folders, notes, and tasks. Projects essentially get their own calendars, contacts etc. It’s awesome. When I want to work on a project I have everything, EVERYTHING right at my fingertips in Entourage. Files, Contacts, Calendars, Tasks, Mail Message, and Notes are all right in one place for easy access. Not to mention that you can share Projects with other Entourage users. I don’t know anyone who uses Entourage so I don’t know how well this works, but I’m hoping that will change in the near future.
This just makes me think that I shouldn’t have changed in the first place. It also has me very excited about the new Office 2008 for Mac. I can’t wait to get my hands on it and have something that runs faster, and is more compatible with Leopard and my new MacBook Pro. I’m not a big Microsoft fan as a general rule, but I am a fan of GOOD software. I think Entourage fits in this category and I can’t wait for the Guys and Gals over at MacBU to “get’r done” as the saying goes. I’m really looking forward to putting it through it’s paces and seeing how it will improve things even more.
| 2.5 |
So, have you tried out Entourage 2008? How is that working for you as a GTD tool?
It actually does very well. I think that there are some real advantages to it. One of the things that come to mind is the ability to push things to projects and categories (Contexts) with built in scripts.
The other nice thing is how the projects can be organized.
I also use Entourage as my GTD tool (categories = contexts, projects = projects), but I also use Entourage’s Projects & Project Centre to tie together reference material; e.g. all mail, tasks, notes and files belonging to a certain client. The problem is that my Projects list now has lots of entries - some for actual projects, some for reference topics. I’ve ’solved’ this by preceding each project proper with an asterisk (*), this way they sort before the reference material. However, I’m not totally happy with this setup. How do you deal with the reference material?
Also, creating an Entourage Project for all small projects (which have, say, only two steps to complete), seems an overkill. How do you deal with these ‘lesser’ projects?
I don’t want to pester you with these questions, but I’m myself struggling with the above issues, so I would like to hear other people’s take on them.
I don’t manage reference material with Entourage. Mainly because it’s difficult for me to know what is going to apply to what. I usually keep all my reference material in a folder called @Archive in my documents folder so that I can have easy access to it but don’t have it “in my way” as it were.