Michael Linenberger's Blog

May 13, 2015

We all save a lot of our e-mail so that we can search for it later—in case we need to refer to it again later. Really there are two main steps to this: filing mail, and finding mail.

Filing E-mail

In MYN and 1MTD, the main way we recommend you file e-mail is to transfer it all into a single folder, one that we call the Processed Mail folder. There are lots of benefits to doing this (compared to uisng lots of multiple-topic-named folders), the main one being speed of filing. You no longer spend up to several minutes per e-mail trying to decide where to put it. Instead, everything you don’t delete goes into one folder, very quickly. And if you must apply topics, we recommend you use Outlook categories in that one folder, and only on e-mail that really needs it.

Finding E-mail

In MYN and 1MTD, the main way we recommend you find e-mail is to use the search function of Outlook. It’s very fast, and if you used field-based searches, you can make your searches quite narrow and find the items you need quite quickly. If you instead use multiple topic named folders, it can take you an extremely long time to find mail as you open and close every individual folder during your search.

So for filing and finding e-mail, use the MYN or 1MTD approaches to greatly speed up your processing of mail. If you do, you’ll find that you can empty your inbox every day, and find things even more quickly than before.

For more information, see chapters 5 and 8 in our Outlook book. Or see Lessons 16, 17, and 18 in the MYN-Outlook Complete Video Training.

Michael

May 11, 2015

We’ve just added yet another new lesson to the MYN-Outlook Complete Video Training course. Anyone who has paid for this video course at any time in the past can access this new lesson.

This new 6 minute lesson is about how to use advanced features of Outlook Instant Search to help find your mail much more quickly. If you’ve had trouble using Outlook search before, because it always seems to return too many results, this lesson will show you how to solve that.

So go to the course link, sign in, and run the new video #16b.

And if you have not yet bought this video course, maybe now is the time to do it. Learn more here.

One Tip from that Video: Use Field-Based Searches

Here is one tip from that video, and that is to start using field-based searches when a simple single keyword search returns too many hits. How do you do that? In Outlook 2010 and 2013:

1. After you click in the search box, notice the Search Tools tab becomes active (see figure).
2. Then in that tools ribbon, find the green More button (see figure). Use it to add search fields. I recommend adding Received, From, and Subject, as shown.
3. Then type into the one or more of those search fields to create a much narrower search.

The training video gives more details.

Michael

May 7, 2015

Does it seem like your One Minute To-Do List (1MTD) or MYN system is bogging down? Does it seem like you have way too many tasks in your to do list? Because of that, are you no longer trusting or using your task list?

This can happen if you exceed the recommended limits for each of the three urgency zones. Here are the recommended maximum’s (and the recommended review cycles) for each zone:

If you exceed these maximums, the entire task system can bog down, and it’s time to clean things up. Continue reading →

May 7, 2015

If you have been using the One Minute To-Do List (1MTD) system but have now built up more than 100 open tasks, 1MTD is probably bogging down and so it’s now time to advance to MYN.

Here are 2 easy ways to move up to MYN:

• If you are using Outlook, simply read chapters 3 and 4 in my book Total Workday Control Using Microsoft Outlook (and after that, if you have time, read chapter 9).
• If you are using Toodledo, simply read chapter 9 of my free One Minute To-Do List book.

Either of these quick steps will enable you to advance from 1MTD to MYN in a matter of minutes. And once you find that MYN does solve your higher level of task overload, you may then want to step up to my even more advanced video classes for Outlook or Toodledo so you can learn the full toolset that MYN has to offer. But that’s optional; for now get started today with these simple first steps.

May 6, 2015

Microsoft just released the Surface 3, which greatly advances their low-end Surface RT tablet line. Don’t get this confused with the older Surface Pro 3, which is much different.

Why a Windows Tablet?

First, a reminder that I feel lightweight Windows 10-inch tablets are very important because they enable you to use a full desktop copy of Outlook on a highly mobile device. That way you have all the tools you need to accomplish powerful MYN task and email management, while on the move. I’m also a fan of the excellent active digitizer pen capabilities many of these Windows tablets have.

Here are my thoughts on this new Surface 3 tablet: Continue reading →

April 10, 2015

As you may know, in MYN and 1MTD, I have these rules about using flags on mail in Outlook:

• Use flags only for deferred replies: mail you cannot reply to now and intend to reply to in a day or so.
• Write the reply within a day or so, then immediately remove the flag, (and then file the original mail item).
• Don’t use flags for anything else. If you must mark mail for other purposes, use Outlook categories instead and file the mail. My favorite category is Read Later.
• Don’t file mail with flags—always remove the flag before you file them.

Following these points helps keep replies prompt and the task list reserved for longer term items. And mainly it helps keep flagged mail from preventing you from emptying the Inbox each day. But there are some fine points to this. Continue reading →

March 19, 2015

We’ve just added yet another new training video to the paid Full MYN Toodledo Video class. It shows you how to use and set up the Toodledo Android app—the one provided by the Toodledo company itself.

We first talked about this app about a year ago (in this blog post) when it first came out. At that time the Toodledo folks said it was an early release and would get a lot of changes shortly, so we didn’t do much with it. Well, recently the Toodledo folks have completed their first phase of changes, so we thought we’d offer a video on it. All paid users of the Full MYN Toodledo Video class can access it, it’s video 22d.

While this app is not as powerful as the other two Android Toodledo apps we show in that class and elsewhere (Pocket Informant and Ultimate To-Do List), it does something those don’t: it includes nearly all the optional non-task features of Toodledo: Notes, Outlines, and Habits. If you use some or all of those, that may be a good reason to select this app.

Michael

March 13, 2015

Lesson 22C in the Full MYN Toodledo video course was just updated to show the latest version of the Ultimate To Do List app. This is currently our favorite Android Toodledo app since it is very simple yet powerful.

Michael

March 12, 2015

Over the last month or so the makers of Toodledo have updated the user interface and their home page. The navigation at the top of the task list is no longer a tab motif, but rather now a set of buttons. And many menus have been moved to the upper right corner of the window. Because of those changes, we just updated a few of our introductory videos (both in the free and paid lessons) to show that new navigation–we don’t want new users don’t get confused with our videos. But if you are an existing user, I think you’ll have no trouble adapting to the new user interface; no need to study the updated videos.

Also, a new feature called Habits was added by Toodledo, but I won’t be documenting it since it’s not really closely related to MYN or 1MTD.

And finally, we just updated some of the Toodledo iOS app videos, both in the free and paid lessons; they were a little out of date.

Michael

March 9, 2015

In the Windows desktop copy of Outlook, occasionally the task views can get corrupted and clicking the normal Reset Current View button will not clear up the problem. The typical scenario for MYN users is finding that the custom settings made to the To-Do Bar task list do not stick; no matter how many times you put in the MYN settings, they just disappear. In the middle of Lesson (Chapter) 3 of the Outlook book, Edition 4, I give some easy solutions for that. But every so often they don’t do the full job. Even reinstalling Outlook may not fix the issue (as the corruptions get stored in the server or PST you reconnect to after reinstall).

If you run into this problem, here is a simple, but somewhat drastic, solution. It’s a command line Windows OS operation that completely resets the views in Outlook. I call this drastic because it resets ALL views in Outlook to their default settings; so any customizations to any other views you made, say to an e-mail or Calendar view, also get reset. Also, any custom views you create from scratch will be deleted.

But this may be your only solution. A recent reader had the problem above in his copy of Outlook and tried everything including reinstall, but to no avail. He then used the command below and it fixed the corruption issue (thanks to Stew for bringing this to my attention).

It’s called the cleanviews command, and it is part of a full set of Outlook command line tools that is written up here:  http://www.howto-outlook.com/howto/commandlineswitches.htm

Following instructions there, use the switch /cleanviews. In other words, in step 3 at that page, use the command:   outlook.exe /cleanviews    (note the single space before the / and no space after).

That should fix the problem I described above. Of course, use of any of the commands at that page should be done with caution as they make fairly major changes to Outlook.

Michael