I would be very interested in hearing your view on handling projects in Entourage, as you mention in your comment above. Handling projects is my biggest problem at the moment. I love Entourage’s way of binding everything together, but have also found that Project Centre is not the place for all projects as defined by GTD; i.e. “every task that requires more than one step to complete”. How do you handle these “lesser” projects?

Furthermore, I have found out that the Project Centre is also handy in keeping together reference material (for example mail and files referring to certain client), but this results a vast list of entries in the Project Centre - some are for projects, some for reference material. I’ve solved this by preceding every project with an asterisk; e.g. *Autumn marketing campaign, which sorts projects at the beginning of the entries list, but I’m not totally happy with this ’solution’.

So, I would very much like to hear your take on the above. Cheers!

The Action Scripts (version 2.0) will automatically associate a new Task (or Event) with the Project List of whatever element you’ve selected. So if you have a rule (for example) that places all email from Davy Crockett in your “Forestry” project, if you were to process a new email from Davy with the “Task from Selection” script, a new task will open with its project list set to “Forestry”.

And, of course, you can also set the project field manually, when the task (or event) opens.

I’ll probably end up writing a post on how I handle projects in Entourage, but for now, here is the crux of what I do. I only use Entourage projects to represent my super-projects (David calls these “areas of responsibility”). So, “My Finances”, “Taxes”, or “New Construction Project” would all qualify.

Archiving projects is then less of an issue when your average project lifecycle is over 6 months (but you raise a really good point and I do plan to look into an AppleScript solution for this).

Next, I setup custom views in the Tasks pane to represent my contexts. Each view is set to only display tasks whose category matches that particular view. So the “@Errands” custom view would only display tasks with category of… “@Errands”.

These views constitute my Actions list. And in this fashion, I can make tasks actionable simply by setting their category. Conversely, I can braindump all my new task ideas to my Entourage projects, without cluttering my Actions lists, by just not setting their category field yet. This concept also translates to syncing your Palm handheld.

If you don’t have this book already, I highly recommend the “Visual QuickStart Guide to Microsoft Entourage 2004″.

Hope this helps!

Best,
-Adam

http://inik.net/node/90

I particularly like the one that lets me create new projects. It creates a new folder in the Office Projects folder and a corresponding email folder, and then I’ve typically moved related emails to that project email folder, and saved related documents in the project folder within Office Projects.

One hassle has been when a project is done, and either archiving everything or deleting. I have to do it three times. If I delete the Project in the Project Center, the email folder and the folder under Office Projects remain. It would be nice if an Applescript could either archive or delete all three at once.

So, I really like your Task and Event creation scripts, but do you use these with the Project Center built into Entourage? If so, how?

I will look at your other related links; maybe you’ve explained it there. But if you have further comments on how you deal with Projects (more than one task to complete.) How have you automated that?

As David Allen says, just getting control of your email and using the two-minute rule puts you ahead of 95 percent of the planet. I just really like to take as much friction out of the system as I can.

I’ve mostly been working in my email folders previously, having created various context folder and just moving the messages there. What I like about these scripts and creating tasks with them is I can indicate what the next action is instead of having to remember it. And I can delete the email, because it will have been copied into the background.

The more I think about this, it could really streamline what I’m doing. Will need to play with it some more.