- TIP: Improve weekly planning in your Outlook Calendar
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Posted by oVan on Monday, March 31, 2008 | PermaLink | 0 comments
Here are some quick tips to improve your productivity with the Outlook calendar:
Create a second calendar for planning your week. Choose File | New | Calendar... and name it Planning.
In the planning calendar, make a general weekly planning by creating recurring appointments. Set their status like this: free status for home stuff, tentative status for work stuff, and busy status for must-do weekly items (backup, etc).
Assign meaningful categories to these appointments (work, phone, email, errands, home, garden, etc.) and make extensive use of Outlook's color categories. If you only need a few categories, give every one of them a distinct color.
If you plan on using lots of categories, assign the colors based on billable status (green = home stuff, blue = work stuff that brings in money, purple for unbilled work stuff, etc).Every Monday morning, switch to the calendar view (Ctrl+2), enable Week View (Alt + "-"). Now you can do your weekly review (using David Allen's GTD-style or Franklin Covey's Big Rocks) with your planning calendar as a guide. Note that you can set the planning calendar to overlay your regular calendar, or you can display them side by side - whatever works best for you. Now it's easy to fill those days and keep a healthy balance between work and family life: a quick glance at the colors of the week will tell you if you schedule enough time for both parties.
Still in the calendar view, with the To-Do Bar at the right side open, arrange your todo's by Category. Based on the color or category, you can now quickly drag a task or follow-up item to your regular calendar:
- If you drop a task onto the Daily Task List, it will set the due date of your task and update the follow-up flag.
- Dropping it on a time slot of a day will create a new appointment and past the task text into the appointment.
- You can also drop your task on the calendar button in the navigation pane. That will create a new appointment with the task text, and open it for editing.
Note: Dragging/dropping with the right-mouse button will give you a popup menu with choices (create or copy a new appointment - with the tasks linked as a shortcut or attachment).
Some handy and lesser known Outlook keyboard shortcuts to further improve your productivity:
General:
- Control + 1: Email
- Control + 2: Calendar
- Control + 3: Contacts
- Control + 4: Tasks
- Control + 5: Notes
- Control + 6: All folders
- Control + 7: Your shortcuts
- Control + 8: Journal
- Control + Y: Jump to any folder
- Control + Shift + I: Jump to Inbox
- Alt + F1: toggle Navigation Pane (full, minimized, off)
- Alt + F2: toggle To-Do Bar (full, minimized, off)
Calendar views (regular shortcuts):
- Control + Alt + 1: Day view (1 day)
- Control + Alt + 2: Work week view (5 days)
- Control + Alt + 3: Full week view (7 days)
- Control + Alt + 4: Month view (31 days)
Calendar views (alternative shortcuts):
- Alt + 1: Day view (1 day)
- Alt + 2: Day view (2 days)
- Alt + 3: Day view (3 days)
- Alt + 4: Day view (4 days)
- Alt + 5: Day view (5 days)
- Alt + 6: Day view (6 days)
- Alt + 7: Day view (7 days)
- Alt + 8: Day view (8 days, no kidding)
- Alt + 9: Day view (9 days - yes really)
- Alt + 0: Day view (10 days - this rocks!)
- Alt + -: Week view
- Alt + =: Month view
For email:
- Control + Shift + V: Move an item to a folder
Creating stuff:
- Control + Shift + M: New message
- Control + Shift + A: New appointment
- Control + Shift + C: New contact
- Control + Shift + K: New task
Has this helped you - or do you have some tips of your own? Drop a line in the comments...
Labels: 2007, key, keyboard, management, Microsoft, MSO2007, Office, Office 2007, OL2007, Outlook, Outlook 2007, productivity, project, shortcut, tip, trick, usability, Windows
- 22 Reasons Why Safari 3 is Unusable (and counting)
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Posted by oVan on Tuesday, June 12, 2007 | PermaLink | 9 commentsAs indicated in my previous post, I had high hopes for Safari on Windows and I've played with it for about an hour.
Although I didn't intend to use it as my daily browser, I did want to keep it for testing purposes. The following list of problems and bugs will explain why I will uninstall it immediately, as it won't be of any use to me anymore:
Update: I've added some more problems posted by visitors
Update 2: Added related articles at the bottom- The interface does not adhere to Aero or XP Windows UI standards (same problem as iTunes and QuickTime (and is subjectively ugly)
- No ClearType support, only font smoothing that looks terribly fuzzy on flat panels
- In Vista, the window has no drop shadow like other applications, making it very hard to see what application is focused (unless you keep checking the status bar)
- Clicking on the Safari icon in the Windows taskbar doesn't Minimize or Restore its window
- You can't resize the window with its borders, only by using the small grip in the bottom right corner (provided it is not off screen).
- You can't close a tab with the middle button of your mouse
- Alt-Enter does not open an address in a new tab
- Typing Ctrl-Enter does not add "www" and ".com" in the address bar
- Escape key doesn't close the Print Preview window.
- Buttons for Minimize, Maximize and Close are too small
- Clicking on Bookmarks button or using Show All Bookmarks function (Ctrl-Alt-B) crashes Safari
- Viewing installed plugins gives error message: Safari is missing important resources and should be reinstalled.
- While typing my email address in the edit box on this page, Safari just crashes!
- The toolbar buttons have no tooltips. I have no idea what that spider button will do...
- Moving the Print Preview window around the desktop is very slow
- Left edge of toolbar on Print Preview window has transparent part
- Loading a different website in the main Safari window while the Print Preview window is still open, renders the new site also in Print Preview mode. I can't see the use of that, and the Print Preview should probably be a modal box.
- Safari doesn't maximize properly on a second monitor.
- Side-scrolling with the mouse does not work
- Using Back & Forward buttons on my Logitech mouse doesn't work either
- Not only does it use a lot of memory, it also leaks memory fast! Reloading this blog post a few times will eat up a few megabytes extra.
- And finally... it does not uninstall gracefully. It leaves a lot of orphaned registry entries, including for the Bonjour technology.
- Submitted by Tamir: Choose Language description in Hebrew is shown in reverse.
- Submitted by Philip: It's impossible to change the proxy settings.
- Submitted by anonymous: Preferences do not persist between sessions, nor is there a save button!
Okay, I agree that some bugs mentioned will be fixed, as this is a beta version after all. What will not be fixed however, is the fact that although Apple has the reputation of building user friendly devices and software, it actually fails totally in the User Experience! They have the arrogance to ignore de facto UI standards on the Windows platform, and by doing so they confirm what I've always thought about their products: they're (most of the time) beautiful but not practical. Sure, a lot of people benefit from a simple user interface, but not if it makes it harder to use the product: you can't easily resize the window, the font rendering looks horrible, buttons have no tooltips, the top header panel is huge, the removal of the status bar makes you wonder if your webpage stops at the bottom of your screen or continues under the taskbar, etc.
Apple might think that they'll gain some market share back from FireFox or Internet Explorer, but as it is now it just might backfire...
What are your thoughts? What problems did you encounter, or maybe you really like it? Let us know!
Here are some related articles on other blogs:- View from W6th: Mac browser on the pc
- Phun-ky.net: Safari on Windows bugs
- 456 berea street: Safari now officially available for Windows
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