Microsoft® Outlook® is the number one email client for business users in the world. Ezidoesit adds killer task management features to Outlook and works just as if was a part of Outlook. Most Outlook users don't use the built in tasks option because it takes too long to enter a task and even in Outlook 2007 you cannot schedule tasks like you can in Ezidoesit.

 

Ezidoesit has been designed to have a very visual and colourful interface. This makes tasks quick and easy to create and visually Ezidoesit shows you exactly what your work day, week or any other time period looks like. And all of this information is automatically created when you drag and drop an email onto the Elevator Bar and create an Ezidoesit task.

 

Ezidoesit Workgroup Edition is the multi-user version of Ezidoesit and you can get more information here.

 

 

Someone sends you an email asking you to do something. This is how most people in business get their work requests today. This request may have come from a customer, a supplier, your boss or another work colleague. You read the email and decide this request will take 3 hours and it is critical. What I have described is common for everyone who uses email. What is different is that for a great number of people that is as far as the process goes. The email request gets lost in the bulk of other emails in the Inbox, other more important (sometimess less important) items take precendant over your time, so nothing happens until it becomes a crisis. This leads to missed business opportunities, damaged reputations (both personal and the companies), stress, emotion and a range of other unpleasant feelings. Saying the dog ate your homework may have worked in school but does not work in business.

 

Everyone in business today is busy and some are under a lot of stress. The pressure to perform tasks at great speed is all around us. So we need tools to organize our work day schedule, reduce stress, save us time, get rid of distraction and lead to better job efficiency and satisfaction.

 

 

If we go back to the 3 hour work request above, the following is what would happen if you were using Ezidoesit.

 

Once you have read the email and decided (taken an educated guess) it will take 3 hours, you drag and drop the email onto one of the colours on the Ezidoesit Elevator Bar. The colours signify the priority of the work task - red is critical, orange is high, yellow is medium and green is low priority. This will take a couple of seconds.

 

What happens now depends on how you have setup your Ezidoesit rules (configure in Ezidoesit Settings), but a typical scenario will be, if you drop it on red for critical, a task windows pops up displaying the content of the original email. Most of fields for the task are prefilled with information from the email and from the Ezidoesit rules. For most tasks there are three things you have to do now - overwrite the Task Duration amount (lets say the default for a critical task was 2 hours, this task will take 3 hours so highlight this field and type in 3 and press enter), decide what day you want to schedule this task (select from the pop up calendar) and click on the save button to save the task and schedule it.

 

The whole process is displayed in the diagram below. After using Ezidoesit for 30 minutes this process should take no more that 20-30 seconds.

 

A common scenario in using Ezidoesit is that when you create a task, a rule moves the original email to another folder.

What this achieves cannot be underestimated, it clears the Inbox of email which makes you feel better and you know the task has been scheduled in your calendar. Having less email in the Inbox stops the "Deer in the headlights" syndrome, where there are so many emails you don't know where to start.

 

Having done this to all of the appropriate emails in your Inbox you now do something revolutionary; you work from either your Outlook Calendar or the Ezidoesit Ribbon View. Not working from your Inbox reduces stress, lowers distraction and gets work done on time.

 

Save 60 minutes a Day

We think Ezidoesit will save the average user at least 60 minutes a day! Why?

 

You are working on the important things because Ezidoesit has scheduled tasks in the Outlook Calendar according to the tasks priority.

 

The distraction of the email Inbox is greatly reduced, this saves time.

 

Creating tasks and scheduling this as work in your calendar is really easy and very quick as we have described above.

 

Dynamic Tasks

 

One of the problems with working from email in the Inbox is that you are not looking at the big picture regarding your work, you are looking at one item at a time. Is this really a bad thing to do? Well imagine a ship or a house being built. Do the builders focus on one part of the project with no plan for the completed item? Of course they don't and we would all think this was silly if they did. But most "knowledge workers" don't have a work plan or use any form of work scheduling tools.

 

Why is this?

 

People are busy and they will only use software that is quick and easy to learn and helps them. Lots of software cannot meet these conditions, it might help you eventually but it is complex and difficult to learn how to use it.

 

Ezidoesit is easy to learn and it really helps you. Your work schedule with Ezidoesit is the Outlook Calendar. Once you have scheduled your email each day, open the calendar and look at the whole picture, view your work week.

 

 

In Outlook 2007 you will see your appointments and meetings and your Ezidoesit tasks appear in the colour of the tasks priority - red, orange, yellow and green. Initially through a quick glance this allows you to visually see what you have to work on today, tomorrow and the rest of the week. At this time you are not interested in the detail of the tasks you are interested in - 

This gives you a quick overview of what you have to work on. And your brain can work this out very quickly because it is processing visual information and half of our brains are given over to directly or indirectly processing visual information. You could call this pattern recognition. Now below is the very cool part to Ezidoesit.

 

 

We link Ezidoesit tasks dynamically to the Outlook Calendar.

 

If after looking at the big picture in calendar you decide you really don't have to do a task today but can do it in 2 days time, simply drag the task to another day and time. Now click off the task in the calendar, on the Ezidoesit menu in Outlook open the drop down menu and select Task List, find the task you just moved and you will see it has been automatically updated with the new date and time.

 

The same will happen if you shrink a task size in the calendar, this will reduce the time to complete the task.

 

The reverse of this would be where you change the task details in the Task List and these changes are visually reflected in the calendar.

 

Quick, simple to do and understand. It is like sorting coloured playing cards around on a glass table.