Nik's Crappy Blog

Learn how to transform Microsoft Entourage into the ultimate GTD productivity system. If you haven’t already, read the previous articles in the series to get started before diving into these details.

Now that we’ve covered the basics, how do we actually go about setting this up? What categories and projects do you need?

Read on, and when you’re done, Entourage will be ready to roll to handle all your GTD duties!

Import from Kinkless GTD

If you’re a current Kinkless GTD user, use the attached script (see the bottom of this post) to migrate your tasks, projects and contexts into Entourage. Just open up your Kinkless GTD document so that it’s the first and only document open in OmniOutliner Professional, and run the script. (You can run it from Script Editor or however you want.)

The import simply walks through your Inbox and Projects section and adds all the actions to Entourage, along with the associated project and context.

Since Entourage doesn’t support nested projects, neither does this script. If you have ANY nested projects (a.k.a. Super Projects Mode), you will need to flatten things out and then sync your KGTD document in order for the import to work.

You may still need to do some touching up, but it’s a good start and will definitely save you some time.

Setting up Contexts

As noted above, contexts are prepended with either @, = or +. The difference between these is irrelevant right now, but the basic idea is that @ indicates a regular context; = indicated a deferred context (for example, a Waiting For context), and + indicates a context which is aggregated (for example, an Errands context in which each task is a store or destination, and you would want to add new items to purchase at that store each time you add a new task to the context with the same store name). These will be covered in more detail later.

To make your contexts, just Edit Categories and make your contexts. A good starter set would look something like this:

Use colors here and elsewhere however you like. I like contrast, so I make every context a different color, but if you like, you could have the colors mean something or even provide an extra level of categorization. Knock yourself out.

Views for Contexts

Of course, you’ll want to be able to view your contexts one at a time, so we’ll create a view for each context in the Task view. Just switch to the task view and create a new custom view for each context. The criteria should include that the category is your context category for the view, the project is not “none” and the task is incomplete. Here’s an example view for the “@ Home” context:

Repeat this for each context, so that you have a view for each one.

Other Task Views

Now we’re going to make two more views, one to view all our “next actions” in one place, and the other to view our “inbox” where we store tasks which still need to be assigned to contexts and/or projects.

To create the next-actions view, we just set up a view where the priority is greater than “normal,” the task is incomplete, and there is a project assigned and category assigned. (We can’t really check to make sure the category is a “context,” but so it goes.)

We’ll name the next action view “! Next Actions” to make sure it shows up toward the top of the sort order, and above each of our contexts.

Next, we’ll create an “Inbox” view which will contain all our tasks which haven’t been assigned to a project or a context. This is simply tasks which either don’t have a category or a project. Name it “- Inbox” so it sorts at the top of all your views, even above Next Actions. You’ll use this view a lot as you add tasks from multiple sources.

You may also want to create a view of all your deferred tasks (priority is “Lowest”), overdue tasks (not completed and due date is less than today), or even just stale tasks (date modified is more than two weeks ago). Use whichever views help you most in your weekly review and general workflow. The only ones which I feel are truly necessary are the context views and Inbox. (Even “Next Actions” kind of flies in the face of acting in context, but I find it helpful.)

Setting up Projects

Projects are easy. Just make a project for each open loop/project on your plate.

Next, add (at least) one project for all your one-off tasks which aren’t associated with a project. This just acts as a placeholder so that your one-off tasks do have a project and show up in the right place in the list. For any project which contains these one-off tasks, give the project an asterisk as a suffix. (e.g. My placeholder project for one-offs is named “Misc. *”) This will not only help you keep track of which projects are for one-offs, but it will also drive the behavior of some of the automation that you’ll learn about over the next few days.

If you have any projects that are stalled or in “someday/maybe” mode, but you want to keep them in the Projects view, you can give them a suffix of “=” (just like you do with deferred contexts). So you can see in my example that I’m putting off skydiving for a while.

Quick Project Script

I’ve attached a script, “Quick Project” to this post to make that easier. You can drop the script into your Entourage Script Menu Items (in your ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Entourage Script Menu Items/) and access it directly from Entourage’s script menu. You can even assign a keyboard shortcut to it by naming it appropriately. See the help for “script menu” for more information.

When you run the script, it will ask for your project’s name and then it will create a project with just that name (and a random color). Much easier than the wizard.

If you want to change its email drop folder or its project documents folder, you can just edit the project, or go through the wizard if you prefer.

Adding Tasks

The next installment will go into more detail on tasks, but for now, just set up tasks as you would normally, and be sure to assign them to both a project and a context so that they’re viewable in your contextual views as well as in the Project Center.

But don’t worry. If you’re in a hurry and just want to jot down a quick task, feel free to do so, and remember that it will show up in your “- Inbox” view since it isn’t properly categorized. Now isn’t that nice?

Notes, etc.

All your other project-related documents can go into the Project Center as usual. No worries.

Relax, and enjoy the organization…

Now you’ve got the basics all put together. With nothing more than this, you have a very effective setup for managing your open loops and actions. You can handle weekly review with a quick scan through the Project Center and your context views. New emails or other notes can get added to your projects with the click of your mouse.

But what about all the automation I’ve been hinting at?

What about entering new information through LaunchBar or Quicksilver or directly from email?

Next in Series: Un-Kinking Entourage Part 3: Automation