This post originated from an RSS feed registered with .NET Buzz by Darrell Norton. Original Post: Making Outlook work for Getting Things Done Feed Title: Darrell Norton's Blog Feed URL: /error.htm?aspxerrorpath=/blogs/darrell.norton/Rss.aspx Feed Description: Agile Software Development: Scrum, XP, et al with .NET Latest .NET Buzz Posts Latest .NET Buzz Posts by Darrell Norton Latest Posts From Darrell Norton's Blog

I'm trying to implement the whole Getting Things Done approach by David Allen. One of the big recommendations is to sort your work into "contexts." For example, sort your next actions into contexts like "on the phone", "at the computer", "running errands", etc. That way when you're able to use your phone for 10 minutes, you have a ready-made list of next actions that you can do and make productive use of that 10 minutes instead of playing Bubble Breaker on your PDA.

Merlin over at 43folders has a post about people's suggested contexts, and what he calls meta-contexts:

I’m using this to make three “meta-contexts” that mirror the very general types of work into which all my tasks (and their parent contexts) belong.

• Real World - Primarily physical or location-based stuff (esentially: “non-computer” contexts)
• Think - Brain work, decision-making, and creative stuff — which usually occurs in the proximity of a Mac, but absolutely does not have to.
• Compute - Tasks that by their nature require direct computer interaction: this is the “@computer” uber-category

Merlin uses an Apple, so his example shows how to use iCal to have multiple calendars, each assigned to a meta-context and a sub-level context. His meta-context and context breakdown is this:

• Real World
  • errands
  • chores
  • calls
  • read
• Think
  • brainstorm
  • decide
  • research
  • schedule
  • write
• Compute
  • desk
  • design & code
  • email
  • google
  • mac anyplace
  • print
  • web
  • monitoring

So I started looking to see if Outlook 2003 could do the same thing. Luckily after a very brief search, I found an Outlook 2003 Views Add-in (links to the article, the download is in the upper right) that did pretty much the same thing, except Outlook calls them categories and labels instead of separate calendars. Assign items on your schedule to one or more categories and/or labels. Then create a custom view to display only the items you want. There are built-in categories and labels, and you can add your own with user-defined colors. Sweet!