Michael Linenberger's Blog

October 3, 2012

Is your current task list is too long and out of control? Are you a One Minute To-Do List (1MTD) or MYN user, but perhaps have given up using it because your task list has gotten so big?

This is the most common reason people give up on using any sort automated task list—automated lists get too big and out of control very quickly. Even users of the excellent GTD system often say their Next Action list gets too big and so becomes unusable. Really, any automated task system will easily get out of hand—so don’t feel bad. The common source of the problem is that old tasks tend to build up in automated lists and few of us know how to handle that.

Well, in the 1MTD and MYN systems, there is no reason it has to be this way. There are easy ways to keep your task list short, well focused, and under control. Those ways are built into the systems, so if you have lost your way with either system, let me show you how to get your list cleaned up now. Continue reading →

8/6/2012

In MYN I teach how to use the start date to schedule tasks to the future if you want—that hides those tasks until you are ready to work on them, and keeps your current list less cluttered. But in nearly every MYN webinar and seminar when I teach that, I am then asked “but if we are hiding future tasks from the To-Do Bar how can I see my upcoming future tasks”?

My answer is always two-fold. First, if you use the start date correctly, you can schedule a task to appear a day or two ahead of when you need to work on it. That way you rarely need to look ahead.

But many MYN users, particularly those getting started, worry about being blindsided by upcoming tasks, and so still want to have that future view.

Well, you can always look in the Tasks folder; MYN settings do not filter those tasks so you will see them all there. But the Tasks folder can be a bit overwhelming, so here is another solution: use Outlook’s Daily Task List.

Continue reading →

Aug 1, 2012

There are two features in the full client versions of Outlook that will affect the speed at which you get through your inbox. One is called the Reading Pane, and the other is called AutoPreview. In many cases, both are turned on by default in Outlook, which is too bad because I think they should both be turned off for most of us, to maximize the speed with which we can process our mail. Read below to see why I think you should turn them off; and at the end I show you how.

Reading Pane

The Reading Pane is the pane to the right or bottom of the Inbox that displays nearly the full message when you click on an e-mail in the Inbox, as shown on the right side of the figure below.

AutoPreview

The AutoPreview feature is different; Continue reading →

July 31, 2012

New Version of Outlook Coming: Outlook 2013

The inspiration for writing today is this: a new version of Microsoft Outlook is coming out in the year ahead. It’s part of Microsoft’s just-released Office Preview that demonstrates the upcoming Office 2013 suite and the web-based Office 365 suite. I gave the Windows Outlook portion a good once-over and have some definite opinions on it (read below on how you can try this preview out too).

Initial Impressions

I like the changes in this new Outlook 2013. The most noticeable changes are in the UI (user interface)—the styling. It’s essentially an Outlook 2010 design with a Metro-inspired set of simplifications: fewer extraneous graphics, fewer design elements, and a cleaner, simpler, even flatter look. Imagine removing all of Outlook’s color shading, removing Aero Glass, and removing all shadow effects, and that’s what you have. Some reviewers say it’s a bit stark white. But I think it’s all nicely done and that it has a more updated look to it.

There are of course lots of functional changes too, but those are mostly to how previous features are accessed through the controls. There are also a number of true feature additions (listed below). Most changes are to allow easier tablet and cloud usage. Before looking at those, let’s first examine the impacts on the 1MTD and MYN tasks system, since that is what you and I probably care most about.

Continue reading →

July 31, 2012

First of all, sorry for the long blogging and newsletter absence. I have been swamped giving webinars and seminars about the MYN system, with lots of new corporate clients (a good problem to have), but it has left no time for article writing. I got a recent break and I am finally able to come up for air!

Managing Too Much E-mail

Microsoft states that the average business person receives 170 emails per day; many of us receive far more—even two or three hundred per day. So how do you manage all that mail without spending all day in your Inbox? Well, it can be done.

In the 1MTD and MYN systems we have a straightforward solution: quickly scan incoming mail and briefly ask yourself for each e-mail this one question: “Is there an action for me to do here?”  If there is, and you cannot do it quickly (or don’t want to), you then convert the e-mail into a 1MTD or MYN task and move on to the next e-mail item. This takes only seconds per item, and by using this approach, 1MTD and MYN users are able to get through all their mail very quickly and not get bogged down for hours in the Inbox.

Next, you move all the mail out of the Inbox into the “Processed Mail” folder (or Archive in Gmail) and actually empty the Inbox each day!

Once you put your core work on that 1MTD or MYN task list too, you will focus on doing your tasks in priority order. With this small bit of discipline, is it amazing how profoundly you will improve your productivity and prevent yourself from wasting time on low-priority activities and e-mail.

Worried that you will miss something in your mail? Don’t. You can read lower-priority mail in the Processed Mail folder more thoroughly later if you wish, or not, but your attention is now on the right things: getting your core work done, monitoring ongoing urgent communications, and focusing first on high-priority action requests. All low-priority things come later (or not) and you will get hours of time back each day. Best of all, your attention is no longer scattered by an out-of-control Inbox.

If you have not started using the 1MTD or MYN system yet, get started now by downloading and reading a free PDF copy of my book The One-Minute To-Do List. Using the simple principles there will get your e-mail and workday under control almost immediately.

Michael

May 23, 2012

I often am asked to describe the differences between 1MTD and MYN. Most of you by now know that MYN is a more robust (and more complex) tasks system that handles higher volumes of tasks compared to the simpler 1MTD system. It does this primarily through its use of the start date field—using that adds a great amount of power. And use of that start date is the main technical difference in implementing MYN. For a list of more differences, see this page.

However I’d like to mention a less obvious (but still important) difference between 1MTD and MYN that I only cover in my longer classes, and that’s this: they each use the Over-the-Horizon (low-priority) zone a bit differently. This is subtle; but if you want to dig deeper into these systems, read on.

Continue reading →

May 6, 2012

I want to follow on from my previous blog post where I discussed my dislike for using reminders on tasks in Outlook. If you have not read that yet, read it first before reading this blog.

One additional alternative to using reminders on tasks is this: create what I call the MYN Reminder Task.

What’s that? It’s a high priority task that is scheduled to pop into your Critical Now section, and its sole purpose is to remind you of something coming up soon. There’s no action per se, and it simply calls your attention to something due soon—but something not due today.

This is best explained with an example. Let’s say you’ve completed your taxes a week early and that they are due to be mailed in on April 15. You have a high priority task scheduled to appear April 15 stating “Mail in Taxes Today”. But April 15 is also a busy day for you; you’ve got lots of meetings and might not be looking at your task list very often during the day. So you might set a Reminder Task to pop up on April 14 just to give you a heads up of the upcoming deadline the next day. I use a format similar to the MYN follow up tasks; the task would look like this: Continue reading →

May 2, 2012

If you’ve read my books, or taken my classes, then you know that I do not recommend you use the Outlook reminder feature on Outlook tasks, even when the tasks have a future deadline. People question me on that, wondering if I am really sure. So in this post, I want to tell you a little bit more about why I think using reminders on tasks in Outlook is wrong.

Reminders on appointments are good

First of all, remember that the recommendations of the 1MTD and MYN systems state this: if a task must be done at a certain time of day, then make an appointment out of it—put it on your calendar; don’t rely on the task list. A good example is a phone call that must be made at a certain time—put it on your calendar.

Then, any time you create an appointment, using Outlook’s appointment reminders is perfectly fine. Why? Because they pop up just before the event is due. There is no confusion about whether you need to act when they pop-up or not; for example if it is that phone call, and the agreed-to time is upon you, you must make the call—no question.

But don’t set arbitrary task appointments

In contrast, if a today-deadline task can be done at any time today, then put it on your task list; don’t schedule it on the calendar. The task list is a much better place to list tasks that you will work on when you can—working off a list is ideal for that. Why? Continue reading →

April 27, 2012

I have for years written that the urgency of tasks changes dramatically over time. Being aware of that helps you manage a large number of to-dos with less effort than you think possible. That’s because if you use a system like MYN—one that shuttles declining tasks out of view most of the time—and focuses effectively on ones that are important, you end up gaining time by not wasting it on tasks that could be skipped in the long run.

And the good news is that most tasks do in fact decrease in urgency over time—my experience is about 80 percent of the tasks we get ultimately fade in value. That’s because priorities move on quickly—over time much of what once seemed critical is now a “big yawn.”

But here’s the bad news–and the reason most of us cannot take advantage of this. When a task first arrives, you have no way to know which way the urgency will shift—will it get less urgent with time or more urgent? If you guess wrong and hide a task that ends up with increasing urgency, you may cause damage to yourself and others.

The only way to know which way your tasks will go is to keep an eye on them; you need to continue to track all tasks until you can tell their ultimate direction. But you cannot just put them in a huge list—you’ll never review the whole thing. Rather, you need a system that keeps them under control. And that’s what the MYN system does: it gives you a way to track all tasks with little effort and a way to reprioritize them as their long-term urgency emerges.

The result? You have a very easy, low-maintenance, simple system that keeps just the right focus on just the right tasks. You get the right things done, and you don’t spend a lot of time managing them.

And best of all, with MYN, the low priority items drop off the bottom of your list almost automatically. The result is you get lots of time back that may have otherwise been wasted—so you come out way ahead!

Michael

April 20, 2012

Thinking of your Inbox as the receiving area of an emergency room can help you see how to get it under control.

In an emergency room receiving area, there is often a nurse or doctor who quickly triages patients as they arrive, sending them off to appropriate doctors or places in the hospital. For that to work correctly, that nurse or doctor needs to make quick decisions and keep the room generally cleared. If the waiting room is overflowing and out of control, chaos reigns and people may even die.

In this triage, seriously injured or ill patients are taken right into medical treatment. People who they determine have longer-term or less-urgent conditions are put in a separate waiting room or are scheduled for later visit.

Non-actionable arrivals are also processed quickly. For example, when the postal service arrives with informational mail, it is filed away quickly (otherwise it would gum up the emergency room paperwork). Sales people trying to sell goods are dismissed immediately.

The key point here is that incoming events in the receiving area of the emergency room are processed and decided on quickly and moved on; they are not left in the receiving area. If that room is not kept relatively clear, then chaos results. If that happens, the triage nurse or doctor may lose track of who needs urgent attention and who does not. An incoming patient with serious conditions may get ignored and possibly even die in the chaos.

The lessons here for the Inbox should be obvious. Like patients in an emergency room, some of your incoming mail may need very urgent and immediate attention. Some with slower burn will need to be converted to tasks for later action (and placed in an appropriate 1MTD/MYN urgency zone). Some mail will be filed as information only, and some will be dismissed as sales junk. But in all cases, you want to clear the Inbox quickly so you can make those same quick decisions on the new e-mail that continues to rush in behind the old.

Naturally, the 1MTD and MYN systems have been designed to help you do that—to prevent any of your “patients” from dying on your watch!

Michael