Sheri Larsen’s Flying Cloud

Welcome to Flying Cloud! Please subscribe to my RSS feed and thanks for visiting!

I’ve been unable to find a way around MS Outlook.  I tried Zimbra, Thunderbird and GMail at various times without success.  Each of them were too hard to migrate to and the learning curve was just too high for me.  I couldn’t invest the time to learn a new system while still keeping up with all my critical projects.

The two biggest productivity blocks related to Outlook have been 1) organizing and then finding historical emails and 2) keeping up with my current tasks.

I used to organize my email into folders inside folders inside folders, but I had trouble keeping up with the filing and then could not always remember where I had put a particular item when I needed it.  Also it was hard to decide how to handle an item that it covered more than one area?

My work life and sanity has been saved by the Taglocity: Email Productivity / Knowledge Sharing Outlook addin.   For a minimum cost and time investment, I have been able to organize my entire Outlook library with tags and can now both keep up with tagging new items and find items when I need them.  Unlike other Outlook addins that slow down or crash the software - Taglocity doesn’t seem to have much of an impact.

With regard to task management, I’ve had good luck using the followup flags native to Outlook for keeping up with tasks.  (I’ve never been successful with the “Tasks” functionality in Outlook - why turn an existing email into a Task when you can flag it?)  I know there are a number of task oriented products - but so far nothing has seemed worth investing in.   I’d love some suggestions on tools more task management.  What do you suggest?

Here are some links on this topic that should be helpful:

• Scott H Young’s Blog: The 7 Bad E-Mail Habits that Make People Want to Kill You
• Seth Godin’s Blog: Email checklist
• Web Worker Daily: 10 Tips for Organizing Your E-mail
• Web Worker Daily: 8 Tips To Make the Most of Microsoft Outlook
• Wall Street Journal: Tech Companies Join to Stop Email Addiction

These are my links for June 23rd:

• A Technical Manager’s Perspective: Web 2.0 is Not Enterprise 2.0 - “Enterprise 2.0 is about the Business and is about providing solutions for Business. When I think of Enterprise 2.0 solutions now, I think of tools and solutions usually delivered via Web Services, with much more collaboration built into the tools and solutions.”
• The Engaging Brand : Blogging Brings Internal as well as External Benefits - “However, the benefits of blogging go beyond just using the tool - it helps give clarity to the culture, the talent and the strength in depth within the organisation.”
• The First Rule of Customer Service « Blogging Me Blogging You…”is that you never talk about customers in front of other customers.”
• Overcoming Sales Objections the Easy Way - “Price is the famous one, but is surprisingly one of the easiest to overcome. In fact most objections come down to risk. Do not underestimate the fear of looking foolish, that is a big risk also for the decision maker.”
• Facebook faux pas: The geek’s guide to netiquette - Features, Gadgets & Tech - The Independent - “Here’s a more comprehensive look at how not to get irritated, or indeed irritate others, while you’re social networking.”
• The New Atlantis » The Myth of Multitasking - ‘in his book [the author] calls multitasking a “mythical activity in which people believe they can perform two or more tasks simultaneously.”’