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,
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike