Fresh Focus On Productivity!™

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Although I’ve mentioned before my love affair with Microsoft OneNote, it is worth doing another article, with a bit more explanation on how they can really help you organize for productivity and organization.

Please click on the pictures for an explanation of the different areas on OneNote.

Firstly, you will create a top level category, which is called a “Notebook” (clever, eh?). Notebooks can have pages, but you can break this down into a hierarchy that is more efficient.

Notebook can have children (don’t ask me about the birds & the bees of Notebook, because you really don’t want me to go there!). These children are called “Sections”. Each Section can have pages as well. You can also create Section Groups, which will hold multiple Sections (like the spiral bound notebooks that have the dividers that are folders). Sections and Section Groups can have pages, too, so if you want to provide an outline of a Section or Section Group, you can use that page to do so. Or if you want to post un-filed tidbits of information there, it’s great for that too.

Each different category in OneNote can be colorized to whatever color you desire, and each page can have it’s own templates. Included in the base install are Academic, Blank, Business, Decorative and Planner templates. There are well over 100 installed templates, with many more available at MS Office online. I choose decorative templates, because I’m an eye candy whore and love to look at aesthetically pleasing things. Different templates can be chosen for each different page, so you’ll never get bored of your Notebooks.

• Microsoft OneNote is great for adaptation into GTD. If you click on the picture over there, you can see how there can be different Notebooks (for instance: Home, Work, Personal) with different Section for each project. Within the Sections come your GTD familiars:@Next Action
  @Action
  @Someday/Maybe
  @Waiting On
  @Finished

You can create as many projects as you like as well as however many pages that you need. This NoteBook has just gone on sale for the low price of $9.99. Look at the bottom of that page and click on the image for a larger view. This NoteBook is fully customizable: templates can be changed, pages can be added and you can add as many Projects as you need. I hope that you find it as useful as I!

In the next post, I’ll go into detail on how you can use OneNote to share NoteBooks over networks and on multiple computers as well as

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Gosh I hope you’re nothing like me!

I get over 100 emails a day – ranging from email lists, coupons, social networking and the things everyone gets like mail from family and friends. As I’ve mentioned before, with the schedule that I keep, for me to stay on top of things is imperative! If I fall behind for one day, the work the next day is outrageous.

Keeping my inbox clean and tidy is something about which I obsess. There is one product that I could absolutely not do without, and that is GTDInbox.

GTDInbox is a creation of Andy Mitchell. The need for a tool to manage the archives of Gmail was a necessity, and GTDInbox was born. It allows you to assign tasks according to the GTD methodology, as I’ve explained in this post.

The first step when an email is received is to process it.

• If you can deal with it in two minutes or less, do so. Either archive the item, or better yet assign it the “Finished” label so that you can see the process that you are making to stay organized.
• If it isn’t determine if it is a Next Action, Action or Someday/Maybe
  • If it falls under Next Action or Action, assign it a project. Labels in Gmail can be multi-tiered: So you can have a label that is called “Projects\Blog Research”. If you use Folders For Gmail, you will see a treed hierarchy as shown here. All your Projects will be in a tree under “Projects”.
  • If it is a Resource, then add a label such as “Resource\Blog Articles”. This too will be in a tree under “Resources”
  • Once it has the labels that you deem necessary, archive it! Gmail’s search features and labels are so robust that you will be able to find it in no time.

The next phase is the review.

Review is a core part of the process, mainly used to find your upcoming actions, or to discover more information – or resources – for whatever you are working on. Occasionally it’s also used to clean up clutter.

Each day, you review your “Action” and “Someday/Maybe” labels and move them to the appropriate label. “Actions” will move up to “Next Action” and “Someday/Maybe” will move up to “Actions”, as you deem necessary. Review your “Finished” items: you can bask in the glow of accomplishment, or delete them if they no longer serve you.

Another great feature that is built into GTDInbox is the GTDInbox Dashboard. This allows you to select from several different views of your actions labels based on aging and tasks.

But there are even more nifty features to GTDInbox. Check out the image below for all the extra features. Some of these features don’t directly pertain to categorizing email, but all of them will make you more organized and productive  with the time that you do have.

I seriously could not LIVE without GTDInbox. Gmail is my main account and GTDInbox is the tool I choose to manage it well. GTDInbox is an extension for Firefox, so you can only use this within Firefox. The browser I use and the majority of my readers use is Firefox. Have you made the switch? I switched from Opera about three years ago, for the simple fact that there are a million extensions to make Firefox just the way you want it. The “skin” that you see on my Gmail is a Stylish script called Gmail Redesigned 2.0. It is the most attractive skin I’ve found for Gmail.

Hopefully this article has helped you to gasp the ability that you have to organize your email and keep it that way. I know it’s helped me a great deal. If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me – I’m more than happy to help!

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You've read the series, now get the E-Book! Special EXTRA material not included in the blog series, plus three FREE templates!! Templates included are Time Management Matrix, Goal worksheet, and The Completion Journal. Only $24.99 for the book!


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From Gina Trapani at LifeHacker, this is a great article about the new GMaIl Labs features.
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Note: This was originally posted on Thursday evening, June 5th. Several users already have these features enabled in their account.
Starting at 6PM Pacific Time tonight, Google will start rolling out Gmail Labs, an experimental area of new Gmail features that will be familiar and very welcome to users of the Better Gmail Firefox extension. Once your Gmail account is Labs-enabled, you’ll get a Labs tab in the Settings area of your account where you can enable 13 new experimental Gmail features, including signature tweaks, mouse gestures, keyboard shortcuts, and even a game. After the jump, get an exclusive sneak preview at the new Gmail Labs experimental features, with screenshots.

First, let’s get right to the good stuff. Take a gander at the 13 new experimental features Gmail Labs adds:

Read the rest of this entry »

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You've read the series, now get the E-Book! Special EXTRA material not included in the blog series, plus three FREE templates!! Templates included are Time Management Matrix, Goal worksheet, and The Completion Journal. Only $24.99 for the book!


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I’ve used both services and can’t decide which to use!
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from Digital Inspiration by Amit Agarwal

While you can download documents from Google Docs one-by-one, there’s no “export all” like feature that will let you backup all online documents to your hard drive in one go.

A possible solution is that you select multiple files inside Google Docs browser and export them as a zip but the problem is that files get saved as HTML web pages and not in the standard .doc format.

Zoho has added an Import feature inside Zoho Writer that lets you bring all Google Docs documents into Zoho for editing. The Zoho-Google Docs importer can read .zip files created by Google Docs and hence it can serve as an alternate backup for all your Google documents.

The more exciting part is that they soon will include have a “mass export” feature in Zoho Writer that will let you take away all your documents out of the Zoho system in a click.

Now this should immediately appeal to Google Docs users who have never even tried Zoho yet because you indirectly get to backup all Google Docs documents in three steps:

1. Export all Google Docs documents as an HTML file.

2. Login to Zoho Writer using your existing Google Account credentials and import the zip file created in step 1.

3. Use the Mass Export function of Zoho writer to save these documents as .doc files on to your hard drive or anywhere else.

The export feature in Zoho Writer is not live yet but keep watching this space.

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You've read the series, now get the E-Book! Special EXTRA material not included in the blog series, plus three FREE templates!! Templates included are Time Management Matrix, Goal worksheet, and The Completion Journal. Only $24.99 for the book!


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