tag your tasks!

Use Outlook?  Love keeping todo lists, but hate the default task entry screen UI?  Following some version of the gtd mantra, and foregoing due dates for hard scheduled calendar landscape?  In love with tags, and your seemingly endless desire to apply free form metadata to small snippets of text?

Then this is for you.  I hereby present the most streamlined task entry form ever.  Now with tags!

Through the magic of Outlook and customizable forms, I've hacked Outlook's default task entry form down to the bare essentials:  the task, tags on the task, and its priority.  I've saved this as my default form for the "Tasks" folder in Outlook, muscle-memorized CTRL+SHIFT-K, and voila: super fast and easy task entry.

One of the most underappreciated aspects of Outlook is its "Categories" feature, which has both an overdesigned popup with embedded checkboxes, and a free form text entry field.  The free form one takes comma delimited words and turns them into individual categories.  For my implementation I pumped up the font sizes, and sexed up the word "Categories" by renaming it "Tags" to give my Outlook install just a bit of Web 2.0 cred.  (Next up, yellow fade!)

The task listing is pared back to these three fields, and set to automatically group by whatever I'm sorting on -- priority or "tag" -- and I can use Outlook's (lame for email, fine for everything else) search feature to limit my todo list on a particular word.  (Who needs contexts, when I can limit my view to things with the tag "waiting for"?)

I'm not into writing "how to's" for fun, so I'm not going to even attempt to writeup how you can add this to your Outlook install, but if you want the .oft file, here it is, provided on an as is basis, with no support, no guarantees, and a warning it may kill your kittens and erase all your data if you even look at it funny, etc.

Now, back to the task list.

Comments

[PeteTheChop]

OK, cool. But now how do I uninstall the .oft?

[Tom Biro]

petethechop - it depends how you did it, but if you set your "Task" button to work off of this .oft file rather than the original one, then just switch it back. Or, you can just delete the file. Depends, truly, on what you truly did with it.

[smerickson]

Thanks! This is great! How about one for tagging emails?

[David Ing]

I'm about as biased as you can get, but please take a look at http://www.Taglocity.com - thanks.

[Brian]

OMG, WAY cool. -- Hey, that is one nice simple Tasks form but I'm willing to pay you or someone that can hack a good Outook tasks form that allows for A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, C, etc type prioritization & with a General Task list & then another called Prioritized Daily Task list much like FranklinCovey Outlook overlay software. I have tried FranklinCovey software many times but it's clunky & overcoded. Only need is to prioritize tasks as described above in logical A1, A2, A3, B1, B2, C, etc form. Interested? Let me know. THANKS!

[stefan]

i just add A1: or A2 or B1 or whatever prioritization to the front of the task description, as well as some 'tags':
A1: OutlookTips: share prioritization on sippey

it sorts A1-9 and A-Z, as well as synchronizes it with my pocket pc. so i know that everything A is what i have to work on. simple, but gsd (gets stuff done).

[Me]

Does this work for Outlook 2007 ?
Outlook 2007 has an easy Category dropdown anyway.