Wow, what a week.

We’ve been totally crazy-busy at work. Every­one wants their web site NOW. It’s like Barry and Scott com­mented on my Dilbert/quality/design post the other day… find­ing the time to do things prop­erly is really, really hard.

So, I fig­ure the only way to get more done is to be bet­ter organ­ised. Ever since I started using Gmail, I’ve realised how badly under-utilised my Out­look is, and how inef­fi­cient it’s mak­ing me. I love Out­look — I think it’s a very pow­er­ful pro­gram, espe­cially Out­look 2003, and recently I’ve realised that almost *every­one* under-utilises it. There’s just so much more you can do.

I’ve always used a fairly typ­i­cal organ­i­sa­tion sys­tem of one client per folder, with sent items in the sent mail folder. I started my new sys­tem by mov­ing any client I hadn’t dealt with in a year or more to a sep­a­rate pst file. Then, I set the option to store sent mail in the same folder as saved mes­sages. Then, I set up a whole stack of cus­tom cat­e­gories and defined rules to assign mes­sages from dif­fer­ent con­tacts to dif­fer­ent categories.

All up, it’s very much still a work in progress, but I spend less time look­ing in dif­fer­ent fold­ers for dif­fer­ent things, and god­damn it, I *feel* more orga­nized, which is what mat­ters most. Hav­ing proper cat­e­gories and using them for tasks, con­tacts, cal­en­dar items and emails makes find­ing things a lot eas­ier, but I never realised until I “got” the con­cept of Gmail labels. I com­bine this with flag­ging items for fol­low­ing up and using the Search fold­ers extensively.

I have same great ideas for extend­ing out­look that I would love to work on when I have some spare time (yeah right!) — my pal Dep­re­cated Cru­elty (or Mung Bean or what­ever he’s call­ing him­self this week) who is always try­ing to turn me to the dark side (ASP.NET), has given me some point­ers already.

Any­way, the whole point of this post was to link to a use­ful blog I dis­cov­ered, called “Work­ing Smart”. Michael Hyatt — the extremely serious-looking dude in the side­bar, appar­ently — talks about pro­duc­tiv­ity, mostly using Out­look, OneNote, and Tablet PCs (I love my Tablet, too — this whole post was inked).

I sat down to read the whole thing tonight, but to be hon­est, with a can of cheap pre­mix bour­bon in my hand and a Guns n’ Roses DVD play­ing, there’s not a lot of con­cen­tra­tion going on.

Never mind, life’s good. I think I’ll go play some Age of Mythology.