What I am reading – Take Back Your Life: Using MS Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized

I have been reading an organizing book this month.  I need some ideas to go paperless even more and wanted to learn how to use what I already have (Office with Outlook 2007 soon to be udgraded to 2010) more efficiently.  So, while surfing my library site I found this book:  Take Back Your Life:  Using MS Outlook to Get Organized and Stay Organized by Sally McGhee.  When this book was written, Outlook was then in the 2003 iteration, however, the concepts she uses are easily adaptable to my 2007 version.  She has an updated version for Outlook 2007, but I went with what our library had, and will check out the other book later.

This book has some very useful ideas that I have already started to incorporate into my everyday.  The way she suggests you use tasks and the to-do list in Outlook, how to organize Categories, and how to tell the difference between goals, projects to achieve goals, and actions or tasks, seems to work well with how my brain organizes information.  I am almost done with the book and have done much of the “thinking through” that she suggests.

McGhee suggests using Tasks to plan projects.  When you create a new task, you decide, is it an action (she has specific categories for actions like “Call”) or is it a supporting project to help you achieve an objective (or goal).  If it is a project, within the notes section of the task, you set up a basic outline of what needs to be done, who needs to do the action, and when the action is due.  You then use this a “feeder” for your next action to continue to work towards the goal.  I am using this right now to help plan an Arrow of Light campout for our Cub Pack that is coming up in April.  So far, it has been great as we think about the theme, activities we would like to offer, what might help the ScoutMasters, even a menu plan.

As a Stay-at-Home mom with 4 kids (2 teens, and 2 elementary), I need a way that I can capture attention to what they need “to do”.  Teens live and sleep with their ipods these days and every one of those devices have calendars.  I am trying to use less paper and would like to have a way to delegate tasks to them without posting it onto the refrigerator.  In an effort to ignore what they need to do, they have learned to not read the frig anyhow.  Ignorance is bliss, right?  With this system, I can send a task to a kid via e-mail and when they open it, up it pops in the calendar on their ipod.

I am still learning to discipline myself to use this system.  I hope to be able to incorporate other things that need to be planned into it.  I can see using this system for genealogy research also.  I will share that later, as I learn and refine the system more.