Control your day: A new approach to Email management using Outlook and GTD

Control your day (CYD) is a new methodology for people using Microsoft Outlook. 

Jim McCullen, the author of this book, leads the reader step by step to setup Microsoft Outlook using a simple set of folders and rules, to a fully trusted system the GTD way.

 CYD uses the standard Outlook entities like categories, folders and rules without the need of any external application to setup an automation for users to organize every single item in their inbox. The benefits will be instantly obvious for people with hundred of inbox items, who lose track of requests they have delegated and struggling between multiple areas of focus, ending up stressed up and feeling unproductive.

This simple yet powerful implementation will help busy Outlook users to manage their tasks and email messages directly from one view and also eliminate the need of filing messages into subject folders.

The book is available from amazon. If Microsoft Outlook is your thing you should check it out.

Thoughtboxes

Thoughtboxes is a project and task management web application, with a twist...

While its a classic app of this kind, there are no GTD principles followed and for extra simplicity the creators use a new terminology thinking "out of the box".

Bullet journal

If you prefer to work with notebooks or maybe thinking to return back to analog systems for your organizing needs, don't forget to check out The Bullet journal.

The Bullet journal is a methodology created by Ryder Carroll and it can help you structure a notebook in such a way that all the things to do, events, topics, notes and log have their place. The system doesn't have many things in common with the GTD style of handling things, but it focuses on people who prefer simpler methods and don't have hours for weekly reviews.

IFTTT: Recipes for productivity

IFTTT (If this then that) is a very useful web service and while it is not the ordinary type of a productivity application, it can be used to automate so many tasks in your life, so it may have to do really much about your productivity.

The use of the service is really plain and simple. The user selects one of the supported services (and there are a lot of them) and defines a trigger and the supported action to be carried out from the system. This whole set of data is called a recipe. 

Except from the recipes you can create, there are plenty of ready-made ones by other users. I will mainly focus on those which could enhance productivity systems based on specific applications.

SpiderScribe.net

 

In the area of mind mapping web tools, there are still a few applications if you’re a visual person and prefer your information spread in front of you.

SpiderScribe.net is such an application. Designed as a cool flash enabled web page, simply lets you create mind maps with ease.