Apr 18, 2018

Today I released my new 45-lesson video set called “Outlook Inbox Ninja.” I’ve been working on this course for over 6 months. It’s a collection of Windows Outlook best practices presented in live and screen capture videos that together enable you to near-empty your Inbox every day.

Now, one might say that the goal of the MYN System is also to do that: empty the Inbox. But in the MYN system the focus was primarily on task management, not as much on Inbox management. While email practices were addressed in MYN, I felt there was more depth needed for those email solutions. And a number of MYN users still had trouble getting their Inbox empty.

So this new Inbox Ninja course provides that depth. For example there are nine video lessons about Outlook rules—quite a deep dive. Similarly, there are six lessons on Outlook Search (and Search Folders). And lot’s of depth on email filing too. Everything here is a deep dive.

Ninja Scan

And the primary really new thing is the focus on something I call the “Ninja Scan,” which is a method of quickly scanning your inbox to empty it briskly, in one quick sitting.

The idea is that the course participant will learn how to, at least once a day, do a complete and focussed scan of the Inbox to keep it well-managed. I provide a step-by-step approach of grouping your mail by several different dimensions to quickly clean and process it. And the course participant will become an expert at setting up Outlook Rules to prefilter much of the mail before that scan.

Good Next Course for MYN Users

So anyone who took my MYN training will find mostly new material here—they will find a nice next-step of training. It will take them to the next level.

Good For New Users Too

If someone has no task system in place, I provide 5 videos on how to do the One Minute To-Do list, and it’s my best video presentation yet on that topic. (But MYN users who don’t need to learn a task system can opt for a reduced price version of the video course that skips those lessons).

In my mind, this is probably the most comprehensive video course I’ve ever created about Windows Outlook. It is complete and thorough and very helpful.

On launch day (today, April 18) I am giving a $30 discount off the course so act now if you think you might be interested.

Michael

Mar 13, 2018

A lot of people ask me “should I put personal items along with my work items on my single MYN/1MTD task list, or should I separate them into two lists”?

It Depends, but Yes!

This is an individual decision, but I generally do encourage mixing business and personal items on the same list, to a degree. It’s often the only way to accomplish things. For example, many personal calls can and must be made during the day at work because the office hours of those you are calling stops at 5:00, like a dentist office, a car shop, and so on.

Also, critical personal items that come up on short notice should go into your Critical Now list for today even at work. For example, your babysitter for tonight cancels at noon and you need to find another. Continue reading →

March 13, 2018

A few years ago I wrote a blog saying OneNote makes a great shopping list tool, and I used the iPhone app as the example. Since then the OneNote iPhone App has changed its design a lot so this is an update to that post using the latest iPhone app in a video. The Android app should work similar (but let me know!).

Feb 12, 2018

For those of you who have used my 1MTD or MYN task list systems in Outlook, a number of you may have seen the Outlook task list get out of hand as it exploded in size. Perhaps it even got so out of control that you’ve switched back to paper for your daily to-do list. If so, here are some quick steps to get that neglected Outlook task list cleaned up and restarted, all in just a few moments.

By the way, it’s easy for any automated task list to get out of hand. The number-one cause is accumulating too many tasks in the list. Since any computerized list saves everything you write down, it overflows fast, even when most of those tasks have lost relative importance long ago. When the list is huge, you will stop trusting it and give up. At least with paper you can start a new list each day, focusing only on current items, and doing that cleans it. Not so with computerized task lists; if you don’t remove or hide or deprioritize old tasks, your lists will just keep expanding.

The good news is that you can quickly clean the 1MTD and MYN Outlook list too and recover its many advantages. Here’s how.  Continue reading →

Jan 27, 2018

We goofed back at the end of September and posted an incorrect video in our One-Minute Project Management Video Course—leaving out 4 minutes in an important video. Well we just fixed that, so if you are using this course and have watched it since then, you might want to watch that video again.

It’s the fourth video and it’s called Using Onenote for Background Project Management. The section on linking project tasks to Outlook got dropped when we updated that video back in September. It’s the segment that starts at about 6:10 minutes in. All fixed now.

Though you might want to know!

Michael

Jan 23, 2018

Our office received a flurry of emails Monday and today, Tuesday, from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa stating that the latest monthly update release of Windows desktop Outlook has broken all Task module searching and filtering. [Update: Just got one Wednesday from Canada].

The reports are that manually searching in the search box in the Tasks module does not work anymore. And all filters in preset and custom views no longer work. Unfortunately, that means the MYN views in the tasks portion of the To-Do Bar also no longer work since they no longer filter out completed or future tasks.

We can’t confirm this in our office (we’re in the US and it works here), but the fascinating thing is that it turns out we have the same version and build number as those users have (Version 1712 Build 8827.2148). So this seems to be a regional issue. I asked users there to try and switch Outlook language settings to English United States, and that did not solve the problem. Since we can’t duplicate it here, we have no solutions, or ways to experiment with ones. But in the past when search stopped working Microsoft suggested treating it like a corrupted index or a corrupted Outlook install. However this does not sound like that—this sounds like a more specific and systemic bug in Outlook itself.

Workarounds?

As to workarounds, there are ways to roll back to previous versions of Outlook. We haven’t tested these, but here are two articles that provide methods of doing that.

http://smallbusiness.chron.com/restore-outlook-previous-date-46283.html

https://www.slipstick.com/outlook/search-broken-outlook-2016-pop-accounts/  (this latter article is not about this particular problem, but does have a rollback method)

Or if you don’t want to roll back, another suggestion would be using a mobile app to view your MYN tasks like TaskTask (iOS) or Nine (Android). You can of course still enter tasks in desktop Outlook, and convert emails to tasks, just not view them filtered correctly in Outlook.

Or perhaps even consider switching to Toodledo for a while, to manage tasks.

If anyone finds a workaround, let us know so we can post it.

I’ve posted a Microsoft community report on this. You should go to it and reply that it is affecting you or click the “I have the same question” button. Click this link:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_outlook-mso_win10-mso_2016/windows-outlook-2016-task-search-and-filtering-is/fde1d1f5-57fc-46f5-a2c6-340dbd7947e1?tm=1516747772837

Michael

Jan 16, 2018

From now through March 20, 2018, if you schedule one of our live corporate MYN webinars you’ll receive a substantial discount. Normally $3500 for four 1-hour sessions, the webinar for your entire team is priced at $1995 for that period. If 25 of your staff attended, that would be only $80 each. Act now to reserve your dates as open slots are limited.

In these popular hands-on webinars presented by Michael Linenberger, your staff will learn the MYN Outlook system for task management and e-mail control. Webinar graduates regularly report large gains in productivity and greatly-increased inbox control.

What’s in the Course

The webinar is a mixture of live presentation and hands-on coached exercises. Participants will be running their copy of Outlook on their laptops, and be instructed on MYN principles using their own e-mail and tasks as examples. They can ask questions via webinar text. This is the same material Michael teaches in his on-site corporate MYN seminars.

The webinar will be custom-scheduled per your needs. Normally it is presented as four one-hour sessions spread over four consecutive days. But it can instead be scheduled as one 4-hour session (good for conference rooms with the webinar projected) or two 2-hour sessions. We recommend up to 25 people attend, but can handle more if needed.

The webinars are for participants using Windows Desktop Outlook 2013 or 2016. To save time and enable more focus on MYN principles, we ask that all participants have installed the Outlook add in called MYN Views (we will provide a free license for all participants) or have their Outlook To-Do Bar pre-configured per Chapter 3 in the MYN Outlook book (Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook) prior to the start of the webinar. A PDF copy of that book will be provided for you to distribute to all participants.

Don’t miss this special pricing. Please email or call our offices to schedule the event and reserve your dates. E-mail us at support@MichaelLinenberger.com or call 505-395-4541.

Jan 12, 2018

I just uploaded a a corrected file for the PDF book referenced in this post.

An alert reader noticed that the images were lower quality than they should have been, and he was right, they were (thanks Jim!). We’ve corrected that and the images are now saved at 300 dpi in the newer file.

We’ve updated the download links in all the places that you can access the book (see that post for details), so just log in and redownload the file and you’ll get the latest. But be forewarned, the newer file size is now a lot larger than the previous file size (22MB vs. 6MB), in case you are saving in a small capacity location.

The filename of the latest PDF file is: TotalWorkdayControl-OutlookBook-Ed5.4.1.pdf

Michael

Dec 30, 2017

I am playing catch up on this topic. Apparently at the end of October, Microsoft discontinued the standalone sales of Outlook.com Premium edition. The features that came with that (ad free web use, larger mailbox, and more) are now included free if you have an Office 365 subscription (Home or Personal), and if you are using a standard outlook.com email address along with that subscription. More information here:

https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Premium-Outlook-com-features-for-Office-365-subscribers-78c6089c-7faf-44f5-82e2-efa9ebb921d2

Apparently if you already subscribed to the standalone premium version, which I described in this article, you can continue that subscription, they just aren’t accepting new standalone subscriptions. And whether that includes customers using a custom domain address to continue using that is not clear. But, per this post, it appears not.

It sure looks like Microsoft is wanting customers who need a custom domain to subscribe to Office 365 Business and get Exchange instead.

The good news is, you can subscribe to Exchange at roughly the same price as the old Outlook.com Premium. What do I mean by that? Well, Outlook.com Premium listed at $49 a year (after the initial discount). Today you can buy Office 365 Business Essentials  at $5 a month, which is $60 a year per user, and that’s a subscription to Exchange. (Note that domain registration services would be separate and additional). So if you already have your own custom domain name, you can get a full Exchange subscription at only $11 more a year than the old Outlook.com Premium subscription. Not a bad deal for the extras of Exchange.

Michael

Dec 30, 2017

As you know I recommend using Toodledo as your tasks server if you can’t use Outlook with Exchange or Outlook.com to manage your tasks. Toodledo is powerful software, and it lets you take your tasks mobile while fully supporting my 1MTD and MYN task systems. What you might not know, however, is that there are lots of choices on what mobile apps to use with your Toodledo tasks, with a long list made by third parties. One of those third-party apps that I recommend you consider is TaskAngel.

One reason for my recommending you look at TaskAngel is this: if you travel a lot and often cannot connect to the Internet when traveling, TaskAngel gives you a way to work with your Toodledo tasks offline on your Windows laptop. This is how used it. I downloaded TaskAngel’s Windows client and found it to be excellent, with lots of features. Then, on several long plane trips, I used it to sort through and clean up my tasks while offline. I liked the full-screen editing it gave me, compared with trying to use my smartphone. I was able to clean my tasks a lot faster because of that. When I landed, my tasks all synced back into the Toodledo servers.

Also, take a look at the TaskAngel smartphone apps. They have some features not found on the apps provided by the Toodledo folks. Those apps also work well with 1MTD and MYN. Here is an article about that.

Michael