The Most Important Outlook Tool Of All Time

Some time ago I stumbled across David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and it’s been extremely influential in helping the members of our firm enjoy dramatic increases in our ability to manage our time, understand our priorities, and true to the title, get things done. With our lives of relationships, tasks, and travel, it’s been our killer app of 2005. Given how wired our professionals are, however, and given that our information platform is Outlook, David’s method would be more difficult for us to implement if not for his Getting Things Done add-in for Outlook. It’s difficult to describe what it does, but I can tell you what it creates: a full inventory of everything you need to do, now, soon, or someday, on your PC (sorry Mac owners) and your PDA of choice, and … best of all … an empty inbox at the end of every day. That alone has been invaluable: we’ve all found the add-in a remarkable tool for managing email, and the days of 10, 100, or 1,000 (you know who you are) emails sitting in an inbox unprocessed are long gone. The add-in has a free 30-day trial, after which there’s a $70 fee to register the tool. Worth every penny, and in fact, I would have paid more. And I’ve been referring it (and the book) to clients daily … indeed, the more senior and busy you are, the more you need the tool.