Un-Kinking Entourage Part 4: Best Practices

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.

If you’ve been following the series, you’ve now had a few days to try out the system and see how it works. In that time, I’ve received a number of comments and questions, so I figured I’d include some answers to those questions to help fine-tune your application of GTD in Entourage, as well as cover some tips on how to handle your reviews, the best way to carry your tasks with you at all times, and some ideas on how to capture information and keep your projects straight.

Projects and Next Actions

Canonical GTD leaves you with a task list containing nothing but next actions. If that’s how you want to work, power to you. For myself, I want to list all my tasks and have them ready to pop up as the next action as soon as I complete the task before it. It lets me keep rolling and is especially useful if I’m going to be away from my lists for a while.

That’s the whole point of using priorities in this system. Actions which are, er, actionable, will be high priority, and others will be lower. Actions which are on hold get dropped down to lowest (deferred) priority.

This lets you outline everything you need to do for a single project when you first think up the project. But, as always, don’t be a slave to old ideas. If you think a new task is necessary or one you originally entered isn’t right, go ahead and make changes as needed.

Best Practices for Send to Entourage Script

The Send to Entourage script lets you immediately create a task, project, context and even set an alarm in one easy step. Use this feature sparingly. Your goal is to capture and then review. If you have 50 projects running at once, the last thing you want is to accidentally attach a task to the wrong project because you’re in a hurry, or to delay getting an item filed away because you had to spend time considering its context and whether it was more appropriately a project of its own.

Send a single sentence to your task list and it’ll show up in your Inbox view, waiting for your next review. Keep moving, keep being creative, and then when you’re feeling like getting all your ducks in a row and being the boring well-organized you, you can visit your Inbox and file things away perfectly.

About the only time I’ll use the script to drop a task right into a context and project is during my review. (And it’s a huge timesaver.)

Taking it With You (Palm syncing)

If you have a PalmOS device, you can synchronize Entourage with it. You have two different ways of doing this: You can use Entourage’s built-in support for Sync Services to sync to iCal and Address Book and then use Apple’s conduits, or you can use Entourage’s own conduits.

Use Entourage’s. Trust me.

If you don’t, you’ll lose categorization for all your tasks, and without categorization, you can kiss you lovely contexts good-bye!

You will notice that your Palm doesn’t have projects on it, only contexts. This is, in my mind, a good thing. The PDA is a way to carry your to-do lists with you, it is not a terribly good replacement for your Mac. (Try entering 100 tasks with categories on your PDA, then do it on the Mac using the Send to Entourage script if you don’t believe me.)

You can, of course, use your PDA to capture new tasks. My recommendation is to not categorize tasks at the PDA. This will ensure that they end up in your inbox view (well, they will regardless since they don’t have a project), and will thus take the pressure off of your stylus-hand to make you enter a thorough and well documented task. Instead you can jot down “donaldson paper thursday”, and when you do your review that reminder will get transformed into “Turn in economics paper to Dr. Donaldson next Thursday and remember to print two copies”. Life’s too short to spend your life hammering on a thumb-keyboard or mucking with a stylus.

Reviews and Entourage

A few people have emailed me and asked why there isn’t a “review” script. There’s a simple answer: That’s impossible! But, this method is set up to make your review simple. Here’s a quick list of things to check to get your review going (in addition to the usual review steps as detailed in Getting Things Done.).

  1. Empty your email box! Some of those emails will end up in your inbox. It’s up to you whether they now become part of this review or if you want to put those off until later.
  2. Check your Inbox view and file away everything in there. This is obvious, but is a great first step
  3. Review your projects. For each project, consider whether it’s still active or whether you’re done, and make sure you have at least one action associated with it as a next action. (If you don’t, take a moment to determine a next action and enter it immediately!)
  4. Check off any tasks you’ve completed within each project, or defer tasks which are no longer necessary or are now on hold.
  5. Look at the next actions in each project as well. Is it truly the next possible action? If you’re using the scripts to automatically assign actions, it may be a completely inappropriate item as a next action, in which case you should defer that action or at the very least put in a new next action immediately.
  6. Review your raw task list. Make sure you don’t have tasks mis-categorized or otherwise funky due to manual error.
  7. Review you deferred projects and actions. If you’re waiting on something, you may want to add a new action of “Remind X that I’m waiting on something.” as an agenda item. If you have a project that’s been on hold for a long time, maybe it should move to the someday/maybe list instead. Deferred does NOT mean that you aren’t responsible anymore. It simply indicates you cannot take immediate action on that item.

Lists and Reviews

I highly recommend keeping any and all lists associated with your review processes in Entourage. This ensures that they will be available when you’re actually doing your review.

Additionally, if you have a PDA that you’re sync’ing to, you can use the PDA to read your lists and run through them, while actually walking through the process on your Mac. It’s like having two computers!

Questions and Answers

How do I use the Entourage script menu? This question came in a lot of different forms, ranging from “I can’t set a keyboard shortcut for a script menu item” to “Scripts aren’t showing up in the menu, what’s wrong?”

First, read the help. Just open up Entourage’s help and search for “Script Menu”. There you go.

If you want more detail this post on the Entourage User’s Weblog may be just the ticket.

The Send to Entourage script doesn’t correctly match projects and/or contexts, what am I doing wrong? That was my fault. Re-download the script and it should work fine.

How do I handle sub-projects? I already answered this in the comments, but I think it’s worth noting here. I don’t believe in sub-projects. Either it’s two projects that are not necessarily dependent on one another, or it’s one project. Even if the projects aren’t necessarily dependent on one another, but they both work toward an ultimate goal (e.g. you want to sell your house, so you’re going to paint it and redo the plumbing), consider whether your mind would be more at ease tackling one and then the other. Otherwise you’ll end up with a half painted house with holes in the wall as you run back and forth between these “sub-projects.”

But, if you want sub-projects in Entourage, it obviously doesn’t handle it out of the box. Instead, you could use a naming convention, create a note that lists all the steps toward your ultimate goal (a good idea for any major goal or objective!), or just trust your brain to keep it straight, thanks to your regular review process.

You keep mentioning Kinkless GTD. Do I need that or OmniOutliner to make this all work? No. Kinkless GTD was the inspiration for this methodology, that’s all.

You keep mentioning GTD and David Allen. Do I actually need to read that stuff? I recommend that you do. Getting Things Done is one of the few personal organization books I’ve read that correctly puts the emphasis on being productive, creative and happy rather than organized. I don’t care how many stack of crap I have piling up, provided those piling stacks feel under control and I am confident I’m spending my time doing what’s most important to me. It’s a wonderful way to live.

Thanks!

Submitted by heath on Sun, 2006-11-12 13:30.

This is great - especially the script for the Quicksilver quick task! Thanks!

Boy, I hope you'll post a follow-up!

Submitted by ds (not verified) on Sun, 2006-11-19 01:09.

I’d love to hear how this continues to work for you and if you come up with any new tidbits. Thanks for making all this public.

Yes please more

Submitted by Jeff (not verified) on Sun, 2006-11-19 02:14.

I’ve not spent a lot of time moving back to Entourage right now but really want to hear more about how this is working for you Nik, when you have time. Thank you for the scripts and sharing your insights.

Thanks

Submitted by Jason (not verified) on Sun, 2006-11-19 03:47.

I definitely share your enthusiasm for Entourage as a GTD tool. Thanks for making these scripts available and sharing your method.

If there was one thing I would like to see it would be a review type script. I saw you post stating its imposable but why? Not to beat a dead horse. I have been playing with apps like “inbox”and “Ready-Set-Do” which offer these great processing and review features but lack the total package that is entourage. If there were a way to couple these features together it would be a sweet combination.

Categories

Submitted by Grant (not verified) on Sat, 2006-12-02 01:25.

Nik,

Thanks for helping me from intro through part 2. I am beginning to implement steps 3 and 4.

One recurring problem I encounter is task categories. I set them up exactly as you suggest in Entourage. Then I sync with the desktop overriding the Palm. A day or two later I have a mixture of all my new and old categories.

I have deleted all the old off the Palm also. For instance, I have +Errands and my old @Errands after one or two syncs.

Any easy fixes or do I go in and blow out all categories on both platforms and start over (Leaving all the tasks temporarily in an “unfiled” state)?

Thanks.

Re: Categories

Submitted by Nik on Sat, 2006-12-02 23:58.

Just fix everything up just right in Entourage and then sync to your Palm, but set the conduit so that the Mac overwrites the Palm. That should fix it up for good.

Appending

Submitted by Stu (not verified) on Thu, 2006-12-14 02:27.

Nik

This is brilliant, thank you. I have been using this for a week and have two questions:

1) is it possible to assign priority to a task when using the “Send to Entourage” script? This would be mighty helpful. 2) I am having a problem with appending tasks. For example, I have an +Agenda task named Tom (my boss). My first “send to entourage” entry was [Tom | discuss client A + Agenda > Lists]. I desire to be able to enter a second note under the task Tom by entering [Tom | discuss implementation at client B]. To date, this leads to a second Task named Tom being created. I was hoping perhaps that when I ran the Auto-Process GTD Tasks script that the second would append to the first, but this has not happened, and I have attempted multiple variations of script entry (with category, with project, with both, etc). Any advice? Many thanks!

Re: Appending

Submitted by Nik on Thu, 2006-12-14 03:02.

Hey Stu,

  1. No, no way to set priority. Since I’ve kind of overloaded priority to take care of on-hold and next-action tasks, priority is mostly just set automatically by the process tasks script. Might be something I’d add in a future version (coming some day…).

  2. If you use the special list-type contexts (i.e. a context of “+ Agenda”) then it should match up based on the task name, just like you want it to. I think the problem is that you’re entering “+ Agenda” as the context. For the quick entry, you want to omit the prefix and just put in “@ Agenda” for the context. The script will figure out that it’s actually the “+ Agenda” context you’re talking about (unless you also have an “@ Agenda” context — don’t do that!).

Thanks / Questions

Submitted by Ralph (not verified) on Sat, 2007-01-20 22:55.

Can’t tell you how much you’ve changed my life. I had been using KGTD but was frustrated at how it remained apart from the main software I use to manage my Calendar and Email.

Couple of questions/comments:

1- having an issue with appending tasks as well. in fact using Send to Entourage simply to create a new task gives me the following:

Send to Entourage Error –1728 — Microsoft Entourage got an error: Can’t get name of ever task whose category of it = {Category ID 40 of applications “Microsoft Entourage”}. (debug state: Get task append task)

2-you mentioned early in your series about being able to create new tasks via email, yet i never saw anything about this again. What i’m doing with certain emails is to use a Create New Task from Email script I found online - but this requires me to manually encode it for context and project in a separate step. Any other ideas?

Thanks again for providing some invaluable tools!

Re: Thanks/Questions

Submitted by Nik on Sun, 2007-01-21 21:20.

  1. That’s a bug. It appears to happen when you append to a task but that task doesn’t already exist. I neglected to tell it that if it can’t find the task to append to, go ahead and create a new task.

    For now, just create a new task with the first entry in the notes, and then append to that task from then on. I’ll try to get that bug fixed.

  2. Yeah, about that… I haven’t written that script yet. I thought I’d be doing that pretty quickly, but I’ve been slammed. I hope to get to that soon.

For now, your method is about as good as it’ll get. Sorry. :(

Many Thanks

Submitted by Andrew Daley (not verified) on Tue, 2007-03-06 02:49.

Thank you for un-kinking me Nik… my mind is now like water. Hiiiiiiyaaaa… take that KGTD! I am now a GTD Samurai thanks to you.

Congrats! (and a couple of questions... or pointers)

Submitted by Vaggelis Tsiotsios (not verified) on Sat, 2007-06-30 17:18.

Nik,

you ‘ve done a great job in not only showing how GTD should be used, but more so, how to use Entourage in real world use with multiple projects and assignments. Many thanks for sharing with us your experience and work. I am already using your setup and scripts in my everyday work and the ability to effectively/efficiently handle ~15 concurrent projects has tremendously gone up. I am seeking on how to implement the following two pieces of functionality that I have not found out in form of scripts (although I have searched both scriptbuilders and entourage.mvps): - a script that lets you assign a project to msgs in Inbox and then also move them to the project msg folder assigned in Project Properties - a script letting you create automatically a number of tasks with due dates and all, out from a template, for projects sharing the same workflow time I would appreciate if you can provide any pointer to some script of this kind.

Sincerely,

Vaggelis

Re: Congrats! (and a couple of questions... or pointers)

Submitted by Nik on Sat, 2007-06-30 23:24.

I’m glad you’re happy with the system!

Templated tasks: I don’t keep project plans like that in Entourage, but I’d think that if you do, you’d just want to create, say, a template project (or three) and just duplicate all the tasks in it and assign them to a new project. Not terribly automated, but I really don’t have a terribly automated kind of workflow.

As for emails -> Projects, I THINK that if you put an email into your project folder it will automatically be associated with the project. If I’m wrong, it’d be easy enough to create a rule that would handle this.

Congrats! (and a couple of questions... or pointers)

Submitted by Vaggelis Tsiotsios (not verified) on Mon, 2007-07-02 11:15.

Nik,

forgive me if I ask a silly question, but I thought criteria clauses were hardcoded (i.e. “Project” equals “ISP”).

Is there a way to add something like a wildcard to a rule criterion? I mean, I have in the inbox mails from 10 different projects. Assuming I have assigned manually a project to each one, can I run a rule that files each message in its project folder automatically?

Regarding templates, I guess you are right about the typical projects being templated - I was kind of thinking of the capability to change due dates as well dynamically for each task, based on the envisaged project due date, so no need to adjust manually 20-30 tasks in the process.

Thanks anyway in advance for any feedback,

Vaggelis

Re: Congrats! (and a couple of questions... or pointers)

Submitted by Nik on Mon, 2007-07-02 13:24.

Correct, project criteria are hard-coded. So you’d need to either:

  1. Set up a rule for each individual project (ugh!)
  2. Set up an AppleScript that looks at the project of a message and files it into that project’s folder.

As for templates and balancing schedules based on lost resources/slipped deadlines, I think you want more than Entourage is designed to handle. Entourage, despite it’s lame group-project support, is not really a team player. Check out OmniPlan, FastTrack Scheduler, Microsoft Project (not on Mac), etc. for tools that’ll handle what you’re looking for.

RE: Thankful

Submitted by Cam (not verified) on Wed, 2008-10-08 06:38.

I am so thankful to you for taking the time out to write the scripts and inform us on how to use them appropriately. I have been struggling with integration issues, and I feel like they have finally been resolved. Goodbye Omnifocus and the rest; welcome back Entourage. I am so thrilled about using Entourage once again (I’m a PPC user)!! This will help me so much with graduate study. I’m about to go into my Orals and this is exactly what I need to remain focused and not get distracted by disparate tasks. Again, thanks a lot. Un Gran Abrazo, Cam

RE: Thankful

Submitted by Cam (not verified) on Wed, 2008-10-08 06:38.

I am so thankful to you for taking the time out to write the scripts and inform us on how to use them appropriately. I have been struggling with integration issues, and I feel like they have finally been resolved. Goodbye Omnifocus and the rest; welcome back Entourage. I am so thrilled about using Entourage once again (I’m a PPC user)!! This will help me so much with graduate study. I’m about to go into my Orals and this is exactly what I need to remain focused and not get distracted by disparate tasks. Again, thanks a lot. Un Gran Abrazo, Cam

RE: Thankful

Submitted by Cam (not verified) on Wed, 2008-10-08 06:39.

I am so thankful to you for taking the time out to write the scripts and inform us on how to use them appropriately. I have been struggling with integration issues, and I feel like they have finally been resolved. Goodbye Omnifocus and the rest; welcome back Entourage. I am so thrilled about using Entourage once again (I’m a PPC user)!! This will help me so much with graduate study. I’m about to go into my Orals and this is exactly what I need to remain focused and not get distracted by disparate tasks. Again, thanks a lot. Un Gran Abrazo, Cam

RE: Thankful

Submitted by Cam (not verified) on Wed, 2008-10-08 06:40.

I am so thankful to you for taking the time out to write the scripts and inform us on how to use them appropriately. I have been struggling with integration issues, and I feel like they have finally been resolved. Goodbye Omnifocus and the rest; welcome back Entourage. I am so thrilled about using Entourage once again (I’m a PPC user)!! This will help me so much with graduate study. I’m about to go into my Orals and this is exactly what I need to remain focused and not get distracted by disparate tasks. Again, thanks a lot. Un Gran Abrazo, Cam

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