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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)
Working out of an overloaded Outlook inbox is not a good idea. It leads to what psychologists call "Cognitive Overload". In todays modern world we recognize it as stress, too much information, too many choices leading to a situation where important requests by email get lost and very little gets done.
If you lose track of emails where customers, bosses or peers are asking you to do something, your reputation and that of the company you work for is damaged.
Too much to do and too little time might be a good way to describe business today. Most of us know how we should organize our business lifes however if organizing the work takes longer than doing the work why bother. We need a simple and quick way to organize what we have to do. The answer is Ezidoesit and here are some of the ways it can help you.
Work from your Outlook Calendar
= Create Ezidoesit tasks from email requests for work - this is quick and simple to do, drag the email onto a
colour on the Ezidoesit Elevator Bar (the colours represent the priority for the task - critical is red, high is
orange, medium is yellow and low is green.
= Schedule the Ezidoesit tasks into the calendar. If you have meetings or appointments the tasks are scheduled
around this calendar items. Ezidoesit never moves appointments entered directly into the Outlook Calendar.
= Tasks are the detail, the Outlook Calendar is the "Big Picture". It shows what work you have to do today, this
week, this month. The only resource you have is time; your time and possibly other peoples time if you have
an assistant or work in a team (checkout Ezidoesit Workgroup Edition).
= Task Relativity - with your tasks in the calendar, you can look at the big picture and decide if the tasks and the
priorities that you have set are accurate. This can only be discovered when you see tasks next to each other
rather than in isolation. In Outlook 2007, Ezidoesit tasks are displayed in the colour of their priority so critical
tasks are in red through to low priority which are in green. Visually the calendar shows you in a split second
how your workload is looking. If you need to adjust when you are going to work on certain tasks just drag
them to different times or days. You Ezidoesit task times will be updated automatically.
Clearout you Outlook Inbox
If you have 2000 emails in your inbox it is going to make work very difficult. The people I have met who have inboxes like this normally are very slow at answering emails. It makes life too difficult.
Ezidoesit allows you to set rules in the Settings option that control what happens when you drag an email onto a colour on the Elevator Bar. These rules allow you to specify a folder to move the original email to when the Ezidoesit task is added. You can over ride this setting in the task before you save it. Moving the email clears it out of your inbox.
Once you have created tasks and scheduled these into the calendar your inbox will be left with newsletter type emails, personal emails, emails that require a quick answer and junk emails. If you move these in bulk out of the inbox to a Read Later folder you will be left with an inbox that is nearly empty. There is a positive mental feeling that comes from having as little email in your inbox as you can manage. You know the important emails are not lost as you have the original stored in a folder and a copy in an Ezidoesit scheduled task.
Use the Performance Gauge or EziView
The Performance Gauge is like a dial on the dashboard of a car or on the flight deck of an aircraft. This displays a pie chart showing how much of your your available time (the hours you work) is scheduled for critical, high, medium, low tasks plus free time and meetings. You can view it for today, tomorrow, this week, next week this month or a date range.
Instantly you can see the percentage of your time is spent on the tasks priorities, how many hours and tasks make up a priority and how much free time you have available (your capacity for more work).
In Outlook 2007 you can use the EziView feature in Ezidoesit which displays the Elevator Bar, the Performance Gauge and the Ribbon View (a top down list of current tasks) on this Outlook task pane.
All of the reporting on task and scheduling information in Ezidoesit is created automatically by the drag and drop process to create an Ezidoesit task - in seconds.
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