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kaizen and fight or flight

Via 43Folders (Merlin, glad to see you back stringing together more than 140 characters at a time!), this little snippet in a NYTimes piece from M.J. Ryan on the benefits of practicing kaizen...

Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain. ... If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.

Usually when I quote things like this I say "go read the rest." But this time, not so much. That's basically the best graf in the piece. (Look, I've just saved you time! Now go outside and enjoy the sunshine for a few minutes.)

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.

when in doubt, delete.

Great quote in the comments of a post by Raymond Chen @ Microsoft about his attempts to simplify his office layout:

"The older I get, the more I realize my best tool is my trash can."

I still have about 40 boxes of books in my garage that I've yet to move into our house, three years on.  On sum, I bet I've actively thought about three boxes worth.  I'm seriously tempted to sell or donate the rest of them.  Who needs all those books?

go ahead, edit it

I usually don't post little tips like this, but this one is just too simple, useful and undiscoverable to pass up.  Courtesy of the 43 Folders discussion list:  subject line editing in Outlook:

First, double click the e-mail (or hit enter) to open it in a separate window. Then put your cursor on the subject line and start typing. That's it. You can add your own reference - date, project number, whatever - or change the subject line completely. Whatever is going to be meaningful to you. Use as many words you like. When you're done, Ctrl+S to save.

Go nuts.

right click, make task

For the GTD in Outlook folks (and you know who you are), there are two videos up on Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows from PDC 2005 that are worth watching.  The first one shows off Outlook 12's new "to do bar," which is viewable when you're reading email, and the ability to right-click and automatically create a task from a message.  The second one shows off the integrated RSS reader, and the rebuilt search implementation.  (It's.  About. Time.)

Outlook 12 isn't getting the UI overhaul that the rest of the Office suite is (the changes in v11 were probably enough for most folks), but the simple "right click, make task" feature will be addition enough...