GTD® and Office 365™ Outlook: A Simple Solution to Get Your Task Sorting Back
For many of us using Getting Things Done® by David Allen, the dawn of Office 365™ Outlook (we will refer to it as Office web) introduced a significant challenge. Outlook web, to this day, does not allow sorting of tasks by category. Tasks not sorted by GTD® categories is like pairing different-colored socks together in your sock drawer. You can still see all the different color and type of socks in the same drawer, but they are jumbled together in a disorganized mess. This lack of sorting in Office web greatly reduces the effectiveness of GTD task entry and management.
There is a solution, and it is surprisingly simple! See below for simple instructions to getting your tasks back in order whether using Outlook desktop, Outlook web, or Outlook mobile.
David Allen’s GTD method recommends a common list of contextual categories for organizing tasks, including…
.PROJECTS
@WAITING FOR
COMPUTER
HOME
OFFICE
CALLS
ERRANDS
ANYWHERE
And others…
In the desktop version of Microsoft Outlook, your tasks can be set to automatically sort by these contextual categories. However, Outlook web and Outlook mobile do not provide this same sorting option. When all tasks are mingled together in alphabetical order by subject, this greatly reduces the effectiveness of the GTD method. Thus, a simple solution is to prefix every task entry with the category name, like this….
.PROJECT: Project Management IP Development
ANY: Conduct Horizons of Focus
CALL: Mom to invite to new home
COMP: Research MBA programs
COMP: Write GTD and Office 365 Outlook: Solved Simply article
ERRAND: Buy zip ties 12”
HOME: Set up new office
HOME: Clear out inbox
WAITING: Maintenance to fix pilot light on gas fireplace
The example entries listed above show how the prefix for each task entry would look in Outlook web and Outlook mobile task pane. Because these versions of Outlook do allow sorting alphabetically by subject, the category prefix in the task description replicates the grouping of tasks by category. For each of these task entries, you would also select Outlook category in addition to typing the prefix, so that the Outlook desktop view sorts by category (optimal user experience), while the Outlook web and Outlook mobile views sort alphabetically by subject (less optimal, but still quite effective).
Many articles have been written about third-party software programs and other methods to overcome the difficulty Office 365 Outlook presented to us GTD users. This is the only article, as of this writing, that presents this simplest approach to solving this issue. With this simple solution, applicable in as little as 5 minutes, you can convert your GTD system to use prefixes for each entry, that allows a simulated categorization using Outlook web, Outlook mobile, and any view you use to interact with your Outlook task list.
Try this and let me know how it works. I hope this solves this significant hurdle us GTD users have faced when using Outlook web and Outlook mobile without proper task sorting.
Happy Learning. Happy Development.
Brian Davidson, PMP, CSM
GTD and Gettings Things Done are registered trademarks of the David Allen Company.
Office 365 and Outlook are registered trademarks of Microsoft.
