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Task managers - what should they be able to do?
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Posted by Graham Rhind
Apr 1, 2008 at 07:44 AM
>Graham, can you
>point me to your Amazon review? I don’t have time to wade through the hundreds of
>comments.
>
>Jack
This is what I wrote in my GTD review:
“As the author admits throughout this book, it contains little more than good common sense. There’s nothing wrong with this - many people need common sense solutions to be spelled out to them. However, it’s a real slog to get through this book - the material is dry and it could have been better written and less repetitive.
The book is very USA-centric. It annoyingly uses local product names, for example, that won’t mean much to people outside the USA. Furthermore, despite Allen’s protests to the contrary, I would contend that his system needs tweaking to make it more useful for many people outside his own main area of experience (white collar higher management in Western societies). Understandably, Allen’s experience with those of us in other jobs and in other cultures and who wouldn’t dream of hiring a consultant to tell us how to organise ourselves, let alone be able to pay them, is limited, and though the main (common sense) approach is fine, it can be approached more flexibly than Allen suggests.
I do have to ask myself how Allen’s customers had managed to become top executives of large companies without being able to organise themselves, even with all the resources at their disposal ...”
Graham
Posted by Graham Rhind
Apr 1, 2008 at 07:48 AM
Hello Jack,
I only started using Outlook with version 2007 (I’m no expert with it!) and I think it’s the new flagging system in that version that gives no option to copy the e-mail instead of flagging it as a todo. See http://blogs.msdn.com/melissamacbeth/archive/2006/10/26/don-t-delete-mark-it-complete.aspx
It would be nice if there was a way around it.
Graham
Jack Crawford wrote:
>
>
>Graham Rhind wrote:
> I also have a problem with using Outlook as the basis of task
>
>>management mainly because of its strange behaviour in deleting an associated
>e-mail
>>when deleting a task. I know the task can be marked as completed and not
>deleted, but
>>this stuffs the task manager full of completed tasks which can never be
>deleted.
>>Strange and utterly annoying.
>
>Graham
>
>If you drag & drop an Outlook
>email onto the tasks panel, it gives you the option of copying the email as a text or
>attachment. If you subsequently delete the task, the original email remains
>untouched.
>
>Or I am misunderstanding your point?
>
>Jack
Posted by Jack Crawford
Apr 1, 2008 at 10:46 AM
>Graham Rhind wrote:
>I only started using Outlook with version 2007 (I’m no expert with it!) and I think it’s the new flagging system in that version that gives >no option to copy the e-mail instead of flagging it as a todo. See http://blogs.msdn.com/melissamacbeth/archive/2006/10/26/don-t-delete-mark-it-complete.aspx
>It would be nice if there was a way around it.
Hi Graham
I just tested this and I get a different result on my Outlook 2007 SP1. Flagging an email (i.e. follow-up) places a task in the To-do Bar. Trying to delete the task there does give the message about deleting the email as well. However, marking it complete in the To-do Bar (right click | follow-up | mark complete) causes the task to disappear. It does not appear at all in my tasks folder. The original email remains where it was, but now with the header changed to indicate that there had been a follow-up now completed. Was the problem fixed in SP1?
If this still doesn’t work, I would use the old 2003 techniques: drag & drop the email onto the task folder to create a new task, or open a blank new task and insert item (the relevant email).
I agree it’s important to be able to link emails and tasks (as well as emails and calendar items).
Hope this helps somehow.
Jack
Posted by Graham Rhind
Apr 1, 2008 at 11:12 AM
You’re right Jack, and I see that views can be filtered so as not to show completed tasks. However, it’s a process that doesn’t fit comfortably into my tidy mind, and occasionally I need to view all tasks, and then the huge number of completed tasks make the process unnecessarily painful.
It’s probably just me. I hate to have completed tasks listed anywhere.
Graham
Posted by Daly de Gagne
Apr 1, 2008 at 03:27 PM
Graham, I find your comments on GTD being American-centric and other cultures interesting, and would like to invite you to join our discussion on the Yahoo GTD group. This group, which I own, is one of the largest GTD groups on the net with about 6,000 plus members. We have talked about many aspects of GTD, but I cannot recall that we looked in any detail at the points that you raise.
Our group often discusses various software alternatives for GTD also. But some of us are more paper oriented, and prefer talking about the latest sales at Levenger, and what’s happening in the high tech world of fountain pens and inks—actually, there is a high tech fountain pen ink, developed by Noodler; it is water based as all fountain pen inks need to be for the health of the pen, but a special chemical in the ink immediately binds the ink tot he cellulose in paper, thus making it truly permanent, non-smudgeable, etc.
Anyone here is also welcome to join us in our discussions, which have made references from tie to time to this group.
Daly
Discuss and learn about David Allen’s Getting Things Done:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Getting_Things_Done/
Graham Rhind wrote:
>>Graham, can you
>>point me to your Amazon review? I don’t have time to wade through the
>hundreds of
>>comments.
>>
>>Jack
>
>This is what I wrote in my GTD review:
>
>“As the
>author admits throughout this book, it contains little more than good common sense.
>There’s nothing wrong with this - many people need common sense solutions to be
>spelled out to them. However, it’s a real slog to get through this book - the material is
>dry and it could have been better written and less repetitive.
>
>The book is very
>USA-centric. It annoyingly uses local product names, for example, that won’t mean
>much to people outside the USA. Furthermore, despite Allen’s protests to the
>contrary, I would contend that his system needs tweaking to make it more useful for
>many people outside his own main area of experience (white collar higher management
>in Western societies). Understandably, Allen’s experience with those of us in other
>jobs and in other cultures and who wouldn’t dream of hiring a consultant to tell us how
>to organise ourselves, let alone be able to pay them, is limited, and though the main
>(common sense) approach is fine, it can be approached more flexibly than Allen
>suggests.
>
>I do have to ask myself how Allen’s customers had managed to become top
>executives of large companies without being able to organise themselves, even with
>all the resources at their disposal ...”
>
>Graham
>