Time and Task Management for Microsoft Outlook
Outlook allows you to itemize your workload, to create a task list or To Do list. Listing tasks is a great way to remember them, but it doesn’t create a plan for effectively getting them done. You don’t really know when anything will get finished, what your priorities are, or when you need to start stuff to deliver work by the required dates. You don’t even know whether the required dates are achievable!
What do you tell your boss, or your clients, or your customers, when you are given new work and they want to know when it will be completed? It’s not easy to know. You have other deliverables too, some with their own deadlines. If you don’t manage your workload effectively, this will inevitably lead to mistakes, a damaged reputation and stress.
Does this sound familiar? Taskline can help. By automatically scheduling your task list, it maps out your future workload, defining dates for deliverables and checking that deadlines are achievable. Taskline is quite different to the many other Outlook task add-ins that are available, add-ins which just categorize and prioritize work. No other Outlook add-in dynamically schedules your task list.
When you run Taskline, your tasks flow around the appointments in your Outlook calendar. Blocking out task time in the calendar in this way is a proven productivity technique and is called time blocking, or time boxing. It is used by many successful, busy people. Taskline automates this process. Each task is also assigned a start and finish date, automatically taking into account the task’s duration and priority, any deadlines, and what hours are available for work. Taskline gives you much of the power of expensive Project Management software, but at a fraction of the cost and with none of the complexity. You also have the convenience and familiarity of using an Outlook-based solution.
Taskline gives you answers to fundamental time management questions such as:
Knowing when things will get done helps you coordinate with others and allows you to reserve any resources that may be needed. Without Taskline, any start or completion dates you may give out are just guesswork. And the chances are that your guesses will be wrong. Professionals don’t rely on wishful thinking.
With Taskline, you can also quickly establish the impact of new work. When can you get the new work finished? How will it affect all your existing tasks and commitments? Taskline can tell you all of these things. Automatically. The effects of changing deadlines, new meetings or other changes in circumstances can be quickly calculated.
Nothing gets forgotten, because unfinished work gets carried forward to a future date. Taskline can also keep a record of what work you’ve done in the past, and when it was completed. Completed work can be shown in your Outlook calendar, or in a tasks folder, or both.
Taskline allows you to assign each task to a project, to help you organize your tasks more effectively. Taskline can also place tasks in Outlook’s calendar, and keep the calendar updated as tasks change. If you place appointments, meetings etc in the Outlook calendar, Taskline can put the tasks there too, so that you can now have a single view that completely details everything you have to do, when, and in what order. You can also visually organize your calendar by adding colors to indicate priority, status, project or task category.
