Professional Edition Information
Ezidoesit Professional will save you 60 minutes a day through the following options -
Create Tasks
Ezidoesit allows you to create a task from an email, set the task priority and then schedule the task into the Outlook Calendar. The task is scheduled around any existing meetings or appointments and high priority tasks are scheduled before low priority tasks. You then work from your Outlook Calendar, not the Outlook Inbox. You can configure rules in Settings to control what happens to the original emails in your inbox. Ezidoesit never changes the original emails, we take a copy to create a task.
The Performance Gauge feature displays a Pie Chart, which shows how much time you are spending on Meetings and Appointments, how much on Tasks (Critical, High, Medium and Low priority) and how much Free time you have. This graph can be display over any time period (today, this week or a start and end date). Click on sections of the Pie Graph to see how many tasks, time slots and hours make up each section. This is an excellent tool for controlling how much time you spend on critical tasks. As you add tasks, the Performance Guage changes in real time.
Scheduling
Professional, schedules tasks into your Outlook Calendar around existing meetings and appointments. Tasks are scheduled in the order of their priority. This means that if you schedule a critical task for 1pm and a High priority task is already scheduled for this time, the Critical task will be scheduled into the 1pm time slot and the High priority task and any other tasks will be re-scheduled.
In the Outlook Calendar you can drag and drop tasks to different days and time slots. Doing this automatically updates the Ezidoesit task information.
Stress
We work in a space of “increased complexity, saturated with multi-tasking, interruption, and profound information overload. The effect of this cognitive overload at a social level is tension with colleagues, loss of job satisfaction, and strained personal relationships” (Kirsh, 2000 p.20). David Kirsh, Dept. of Cognitive Science, University California, San Diego
The above statement by Professor David Kirsh says that we are all overloaded with too much information, we have too many distractions at work and we try to do too many things all at the same time.
Ezidoesit helps minimize stress through making sure we know what our deadlines for work tasks are, scheduling this work which then helps us reach our goals. Last minute work is needed when we lose track of work requests. This adds to stress. Using Ezidoesit stops this happening.
Distractions and Interruptions – we get interrupted by other people and distracted by ourselves. This means our work never gets done or is delayed. We miss deadlines, our work productivity drops and stress starts increasing as we have more and more work to do, yet we are doing less and less. We are like a hamster running around on a wheel – a great action but we are going nowhere!
Information Overload – the human brain is described the world’s best computer, which it is. But most of what it does happens automatically in the background controlling our breathing, our balance or focussing our eyes. The conscious side of the brain is where we have more control and this is like a muscle that needs to be exercised, but not over exercised otherwise it gets damaged. Lots of information coming at us from multiple directions or people and at different speeds, demanding our immediate attention overloads our conscious brain ability.
This overload does not have to be extreme before we start acting like a deer stunned by the headlights of a car. When you are stunned or over whelmed by too much information you find it very difficult to make the right decision.
Multi-Tasking – this is a misunderstood area of cognitive function in humans. Psychologists tell us that the brain processes cognitive information sequentially, it is just the speed at which it switches from one task to another that makes us think we are multi-tasking. This is why talking on a mobile phone and driving a car is so dangerous.
Studies done by Professor David Meyer of the University of Michigan, who is an expert in the area of multi-tasking, found that time is lost when you change from one task to another. The more complex the tasks, the greater the time lost. Also: working on tasks that are unfamiliar increases the time lost.
But my job requires Multi-tasking and Interruptions
All jobs are different and so are all people. In situations where you have to multi-task, or you get interrupted, Ezidoesit still helps you to see what work you have to do and it enables you to re-schedule work as other work takes precedent over scheduled work.
“In my job, I receive a number of “tasks” by way of email request. Ezidoesit allows me to blend my email requests into my other tasks by simply dragging the email message over to a high, medium or low priority task list – Ezidoesit does the rest!” – North Dakota Lawyer