Inbox: Shit that needs to be done.
Deleted Items: Shit that is done or didn’t need to be done.

Then you can simply look at your inbox and know it’s an action item (or a possible unread action item.)

If people learned to manage their mailbox a little better they would see that printing it out is entirely unecessary.

I can only think that leaving out the Print What selection was an oversight as Outlook recognises paging and lets you select Odd Or Even pages to print.

If the email is only 2 pages long, you can choose to print ODD pages and only page 1 prints.

Paul Hollinger’s solution above is so simle and just what we want – provided folk hit “no” and not “yes” at the end.

Thanks

After all this feature is available in almost all other applications – yet they have never bothered to include it in Outlook despite numerous opportunities. Why? Answer: laziness / no attention to detail.

I use both mac and PC in my work and its these kind of bugbears that Mac users do not have to put up with because someone has taken time to consider what people are likely to want to do with their applications before actually starting to design the interface.

A lot of PC users think they use the best software simply becuase its homogenous and they dont know anything better. But guess what, its actually a lot more fun to be getting on with your work than spending half your time trying to fix basic deficiencies in Microsoft designed programs that are basically “inadequate” for the purpose.

Outlook isnt the worst offender but it has many poor aspects, and this is one of them. I reccomend installing XOBNI, which makes it a lot more usable. How very telling that MS have just bought Xobni, as they were too lazy/incapable to develop the usable functions themselves.

I know this is an age old rant, but really guyss – its 2008, computing shouldn’t have to be such a battle!!

Happy email printing – enjoy those 3 classic Outlook options: “Print All”, “print Odd” and “print Even”.

Hmm… useful!

The other advantage that paper has is the ability to quickly clip/staple a document to another piece of paper. So, you can clip a relevant article to the e-mail printout that’s acting as your action item in your folder system. To do that electronically, you need to have a good scanner, and either embed a link to the task in Outlook or, better yet, use OneNote to associate them. The integration of Outlook and OneNote is good enough now that you can create the task item in either place, and keep all the background info you need in the OneNote pages for that item. There will be a link in the Outlook task to take you to the OneNote page, as well as a link on the OneNote page to take you to the Outlook task. It sounds a bit kludgy but, again, it works well.

So, I use Outlook with ClearContext as the basis of my GTD system. It gives me the overview of all my action items and takes care of the mechanics of the GTD system. I use OneNote for the details on particular action items, and for project overviews.

The ClearContext site has articles and slide shows detailing how to use ClearContext for GTD. If you decide to try it, I recommend looking at those.

Anybody using Xobni?

Pretty cool. It has a lot more features than I would have guessed. I use OneNote every day and I like it. In fact, if I have a lot of background information that I need to write on my plain white paper, I’ll start a page in ON, type it up, and print it out. Then when the task is done, I’ll scan my paper into ON for history sake. I tried to use ON in place of actual paper, but it wasn’t the same. There’s something about being able to touch the paper that makes the system work better for me. I’m not sure what it is, but I wish I knew so I could get over it.

So my question to you is: When you switched to ClearContext, was there something missing not having paper around?

Hey Dick! Quit printing your e-mails.

Seriously, like you, I use the GTD system, and I used to use paper with 43 folders. That all changed once I started using the ClearContext add-in for Outlook. It does all those things you like to do with your pieces of paper, and more. It sets ticklers, associates e-mails with related tasks and appointments, files the e-mails into folders, prioritizes e-mails based on just about any factor you want to use, and more. It also has a “dashboard” view that makes your Weekly Review much less painful. You can use its tags in addition to your @context categories, too.

I’ve tried lots of Outlook add-ins over the years, and they usually stink. Often, they don’t play well with other add-ins, or Outlook itself. ClearContext is well written, and I haven’t had any problems with it.

I’ll also give a thumb’s up to OneNote, like Ron did. OneNote now integrates with Outlook very well, especially when it comes to tasks, contacts and appointments.

FWIW, my only hard-won (alright, Googled) tip for Outlook macros relates to attachments: if you have to loop through multiple attachments on an email make sure your loop counts DOWN and not up. In Outlook 2003 (and possibly others) the counter can get very confused otherwise.