Posts Tagged ‘outlook’

The little things count too; Nozbe adds automatic scrolling when switching projects

Friday, September 4th, 2009

I’ve written before about how small things can make a big difference: Getting rid of your email folders in Outlook, Using “Send & Archive” in Gmail, and things like that.  This is another example of that — it’ll only save you a couple of seconds, but it’ll save you those few seconds often, and it adds up to decent savings.

The project list in Nozbe can get a bit long for some of us, especially in Nozbe 2.0.  I’m waiting for them to compress the size of it a little bit more.  In the meantime, this will help.  I often have to scroll down pretty far to find a specific project.  When I click on it, the project data would load in the center panel, but then I’d have to scroll all the way back up to the top to see it.  Now, when you choose a project on the left, the view automatically scrolls back up to the top.  Like I said, it’s a very small change, but very useful.

If you’re still confused about what I mean, check out the video below or read the full post on the Nozbe blog.

Get rid of your email folders

Thursday, August 13th, 2009

This tip might not work for everyone, but it has been great for me.  I use gmail for most of my e-mail, but I need to use Outlook at work.  For years, I had a complex series of nested folders in Outlook, along the lines of this:

  • Staff
    • Bill
    • Jane
    • Steve
  • Website
    • GoDaddy
    • Hosting
    • Problems
  • Programs
    • Adults
    • Children
    • Mission

And on, and on, and on.  Probably about 150 folders in all.  I was very proud of myself.

The problem was trying to keep myself at inbox zero.  Gmail makes it easy with their “archive” feature (and with cool things like “Send & Archive” in the labs section), but Outlook doesn’t do that.  Instead of quickly archiving an e-mail and moving on, I had to think about where it goes.  Does the one from Steve about the Missions part of the website go in “Steve”, “website” or “missions”?  I’d probably spend 10-15 seconds deciding where to file an e-mail, then drilling down to file it.  I get maybe 25 emails/day on this account, so that’s 25 emails x 15 seconds/each x 260 workdays in a year = 27 hours/year I spend just filing e-mails.  Brutal!

If you handle your inbox properly, you don’t need to fish for past e-mails very often — you just deal with them and move on.  I have Xobni installed, which makes the search process much faster when I need it, so that solves the search issue.

My solution? Treat it like gmail.  I now have a single folder called “archive” under my inbox.  When I’m done with an e-mail, I “archive” it.  Much faster and much easier.

How do you handle your folders in Outlook?