Well, I have become the king of lists. It seems to be the best way for me to get anything done. Even my Mom knows that when I come to visit, if she tells me a bunch of stuff, I’ll get a few things done. If she writes a list, I focus on getting all of it done 🙂 Well, I came to the realization this morning that right now I have 3 different lists that I’m working off of. I have Remember the Milk which contains all of my scheduled tasks (things that need to happen on a certain date) or my recurring tasks, or my items I need to be working on. Then I found another app called coach.me. This was very cool, and it’s designed around keeping you accountable for each thing and saying that you will do something X times per week, and it gives you little high fives for meeting your goals. Finally, I have my outlook inbox. I have been flagging and color coding these items to show me what’s important in my inb0x.
Well, i discovered that I may have taken control of my inbox, but I now have 3 different check lists to be monitoring. So, I figured out the next thing I can do to simplify my life. Get myself down to a single to-do list. My preference is Remember the Milk (RTM). I’ve been using it for years with great success. Coach.me was the first thing to go. I only had about 6 different daily things I was tracking. Two of them have become habits, so I removed them from the list. Several items got added to RTM so they are recurring items. Bingo… one down.
Outlook was a bit more challenging. I have become very good at writing rules to manage all my incoming emails, but I needed to understand how I could send an email to RTM automatically, so it will create a task for me. I found a post that explained within Outlook, you can press Alt+F11, and it will bring up the VB window. It even had a simple script for me to start with:
Sub ChangeSubjectForwardProspect(Item As Outlook.MailItem)
Item.Subject = Item.Subject + ” <tagging stuff for RTM>”
Item.Save
Set myForward = Item.Forward
myForward.Recipients.Add “<my RTM email account>”
myForward.Send
End Sub
then, inside of the rules, there is an action called “call a script”. I just had to pick this. Now, when certain rules execute, instead of adding a flag, it will create an RTM task for me. I’m still working on more scripts, but to start with, this is pretty easy.
Thanks for reading,