Getting Clear Control of Your Tasks Today
Date: Sunday, June 11 @ 10:39:43 PDT
Topic: Career
Recently as
part of my organizing drive to Get
Things Done (GTD) I came across an outlook plug-in by Clear Context called
IMS Pro that has increased my productivity with little effort. A few simple
buttons can make anyone more productive.
Organizing
Your Mailbox
The first
purpose of IMS Pro seems to be to organize your mailbox, putting higher
priorities first. This works great for people who have a large number of
messages in their inbox- but for a GTD advocate who empties his inbox, it had
little advantage. The software also adds some views to inboxes that also has
little effect for me as I customize the display to suit my needs but for those
who don’t want to tinker with outlook setting it can be a simple way to
organize yourself.
Follow
up and other task tools
For me the
additional button bars itself makes the software worth it. There are buttons
for following up, which automatically creates a follow up task when you are
creating an email. It has button called tasks that works similarly for messages
that you receive and want to quickly turn into a task. There are additional
Defer and Delegate which GTD advocates will know about but basically allows you
to quickly turn your email box into trackable task easily.
One of my
favorite features is "related view". You can click this button on a
message or a task and it will find you the full flow of this task with all
related conversations and todos a real time saver.
Some
points of improvement
IMS Pro has
many advantages but it's not perfect. When following up it should give the
ability change the task title after the message is sent and/or add the person's
name in the subject. This would tasks clearer than just the word
"followup" which appears now.
IMS Pro
should also offer better conversation management. Ideally it should track
trashed and other conversations and new messages would be able to be dragged
into an existing conversation.
Another big
improvement would be the ability to tag a mail item or task with multiple
topics (like gmail labels) this will enable full flexible access of emails.
Just
Get It
Overall IMS
Pro will help you become more productive starting today. With future version
hopefully they will hopefully add features to make this an all encompassing
email productivity tool. There is a 30-day trial, so test it out. Clear Context
also offers a free "personal" version also which may have all the
functionality you need- but that wouldn't include the most of the really cool
features.
About the Author
Heshy Shayovitz is president of Metropolitan Computer Solutions. He received his MBA from New York University.
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