Aug 17, 2018

I had a conversation last week with the new owners of Toodledo. Toodledo is the task management software I recommend for people who can’t or don’t want to use Windows Outlook to manage tasks.

The new owners seem like a great and dedicated group of people. I’ll miss the previous owner, but I am psyched about what this new ownership means.

First of all, they absolutely assured me that no features are going away. So all my 1MTD and MYN clients—you are covered.

Next, they shared their near-term plans. The main “plan” is that they want to get Toodledo out there more. Continue reading →

Aug 15, 2018

I can run my business from wherever I want, and so a few years ago I moved my business to Santa Fe, New Mexico, for its amazing beauty and strong culture. And for its lower density of people. Where I had lived in California was just getting too busy with so many people that they were becoming numb to each other. Being a successful technology hub didn’t help draw people in Northern California closer. Rather, everyone was buried in their cell phone screens. This is true almost everywhere these days.  Continue reading →

August 8, 2018

As you know I have written 7 books on task management and email management. In my task management materials, I talk a lot about how to get tasks done. One typical way older to-do list systems try to do that is to focus obsessively on setting due dates on all tasks. But anyone who has studied my materials know I don’t believe in that. That’s because doing that leads to a lot of fake deadlines, and then a Cry Wolf phenomenon takes place where you just start ignoring those fake ones, and then ignore all deadlines, and important ones get dropped.

Instead, I say set a due date only when there is a true hard deadline. Continue reading →

July 26, 2018

I’ve added a free video to the Outlook Inbox Ninja Course. It’s Video number 8.1 and it shows you how to specify when an email will be sent out.

Doing this can be useful for various reasons. You might want someone to see your email at just a certain time. I use it occasionally to slow down an email conversation. What I mean by that is sometimes I read an email and immediately write my reply, and then it occurs to me that I don’t want this topic to ricochet back and forth all day long, so I set the send time for near the end of the day. There are other uses.

So go to the Outlook Inbox Ninja Course page and scroll down to video 8.1 and take a look. Again, it’s free for anyone to watch. And by the way, I’ve recently marked a number of other videos in that set as being free, too, so take a look.

Michael

July 23, 2018

I just read an article based on a new study. The gist of the article is that while finding your passion is what most hope to do to be successful, success really comes from developing various skills, even ones you are not passionate about. The study was done with undergraduate college students.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/inspired-life/wp/2018/07/23/find-your-passion-thats-bad-advice-scientists-say/?utm_term=.affc0702e94c

In some ways that seems obvious, right? You need a range of skills to see what mix ends up working for you.

But their main point was that those who ONLY focus on what they are passionate about end up dropping it if/when the going gets tough in that area. As if to say that the whole passion search is a waste of time.

But I disagree, and I feel that the study should not detract from the importance of following a passion. Rather, really the study simply confirms what most of us know: even when doing work you love, you have to work at it. It’s never just handed to you easy as pie. And it makes sense to get good at a range of skills, if for nothing more than having a fallback should your passionate industry fall flat.

Anyway, I remain passionate about encouraging people to find their passionate work. And I remain passionate about advising those same to plan on some hard or challenging work to get there!

Michael

July 11, 2018

My use of tablets has almost disappeared. And coincidentally, tablet sales are way down and still dropping. I suppose everyone has their reasons for losing interest in them. Mine was that my business changed and I almost never go to in-person meetings anymore—I used to use Windows tablets to ink my notes in such meetings, and not for much more. But such tablets are still a great way to take a full desktop copy of Outlook with you wherever you go, so I am tempted to start using them again.

Before I moved away from tablets, I was using a Surface 3 for a few years, and liked it. It was Microsoft’s only iPad competitor in terms of size and weight, so when a year ago Microsoft discontinued the Surface 3, I was puzzled, did Microsoft really want to abandon that market?

With a recent announcement, the answer is apparently NO: Microsoft wants to stay in the iPad-size tablet market. Yesterday Microsoft announced the Surface Go, its replacement to the Surface 3. It’s a $399, 10-inch, 1.15 pound touch-screen tablet (which puts it solidly in the small iPad form factor). But it has features much like the higher-end (and heavier) Surface Pro. It’s based on the Intel Pentium Gold processor, so it has much more power than the previous Atom-based Surface 3 tablet.

Here’s a good article about the Surface Go from one of my favorite Microsoft Industry columnists, Mary Jo Foley:  https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsoft-takes-aim-at-schools-consumers-and-businesses-with-surface-go-tablets-starting-at-399/

And then a later one from her (Aug 27) after using one for 3 weeks: https://www.zdnet.com/article/review-surface-go-running-windows-10-home-in-s-mode/

And another article comparing the Surface Go to Apple’s iPad:  https://www.zdnet.com/article/can-microsofts-surface-go-unseat-apples-ipad/

Some more reviews:

New PC World review just came out: https://www.pcworld.com/article/3293414/microsoft-surface/microsoft-surface-go-review.html

And one from ZDNET: https://www.zdnet.com/article/surface-go-first-look-small-light-and-the-best-cheap-pc-ever/

Michael

July 10, 2018

At some point you may need to archive your Outlook email. Here are the four main ways you can archive your email using Outlook. Each has its advantages and disadvantages, and not all are available to all people or all versions. They are: 1) the new Archive button; 2) using local storage; 3) using Exchange’s Archive Mailbox; and 4) saving mail in other formats. Let’s go over each of these.   Continue reading →

July 3, 2018

Have you ever noticed that when you type into the search box in Outlook, it seems like Outlook returns only a small set of mail—even when you know there is a lot more mail meeting the search? Notice how you therefore sometimes can’t find the specific e-mail you are looking for?

This is something newer versions of Outlook and Exchange Server do to speed up search results (and to take a load off the server). But what if you want to see more—or all—of your search results to find the mail you want? Can you do that?

It Depends

Well, it depends on Outlook settings you make and which Exchange Server you are using.

In this new video I show you how to adjust those settings in Windows Outlook. I also show how the newest versions of Exchange Server will, unfortunately, still prevent you from seeing all search returns.

Free Video

By the way, this new video is a complementary addition to the Outlook Inbox Ninja course. So just go to this Ninja Course link below and scroll down to Video 3.7—it will be playable whether you own the Ninja course or not.

Go here and scroll down to Video 3.7

Michael

June 27, 2018

We sometimes get jaded by the new Intel processor releases because they seem so incremental—lots of hoopla about small performance increases.

Well, according to PC World, the jump from 7th-Gen to 8th-Gen really is worth it.

Read why here:

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3270625/laptop-computers/intel-8th-gen-core-i7-vs-7th-gen-core-i7-cpus-should-you-upgrade.html

June 15, 2018

This is completely off my usual topic list, but as you will see it is still useful for my clients: good instructions for how to load PDFs into Kindle.

This is important to me because my company sells a PDF version of my Outlook book, and some buyers may want to load that PDF into Kindle.

Rather than duplicate all the steps, here is the best article I have found, and it’s up-to-date: June-13-2018 PC World Article Loading PDFs to Kindle.

Michael