How to manage corporate outlook calendar and personal calendar

TesTeq

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Yikes! That sounds awful! I have never seen anything like that! Im sure if I had someone searching my bags, my perspective would change! That is just not a culture I could be a part of.
I'm really shocked that one of the largest medical companies in the world trusts that none of its 55,000 employees will ever do a bad thing. 55,000 happy people with no health or financial issues? It defies the rules od statistics and probability. :shock:
 
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TesTeq

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I need one place to look and see all my obligations, all my tasks...
I don't mean to annoy you but it is possible that the IT guy in your company can see all your obligations and tasks too. Companies must monitor data to avoid leakage of sensitive information.
 

sesteph6

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I'm really shocked that one of the largest medical companies in the world trusts that none of its 55,000 employees will ever do a bad thing. 55,000 happy people with no health or financial issues? It defies the rules od statistics and probability. :shock:

Well, I definitely have a new appreciation for, and respect for this organization. Im not sure what risk they are taking on by letting me put "Buy son new soccer cleats" in my Outlook tasks. Or having a recurring reminder to "change my air conditioner filter" on my Calendar though....
 

sesteph6

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I don't mean to annoy you but it is possible that the IT guy in your company can see all your obligations and tasks too. Companies must monitor data to avoid leakage of sensitive information.

Not annoying at all, I am enjoying the dialog. It is giving me a lot to think about! With regards to privacy.... As per the DA outlook set up guide I mark my personal items private. I feel like that keeps things out of my Sr. leaders view. I know I cannot see any of my reports information if they mark it private. Honestly though, there is nothing that clandestine on there for me to hide.

The final point Ill make goes back to a previous post. I literally do not know how i could every get anything done if I had to manually turn 250+ emails per day into tasks. It would be impossible. So what is one to do? Plus Ive been doing this way for 10 years, first with lotus notes, and now with outlook.
 

TesTeq

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Well, I definitely have a new appreciation for, and respect for this organization. Im not sure what risk they are taking on by letting me put "Buy son new soccer cleats" in my Outlook tasks. Or having a recurring reminder to "change my air conditioner filter" on my Calendar though....
The security problem in organization is that it does not employes clones. If the company consists of 3 people it is not a big issue - probably they are friends. If a company employes 55,000 people it is a big issue.
And - from your point of view - "soccer cleats" and "conditioner filter" are safe. But would you really feel comfortable having your divorce schedule, debt payment renegotiation schedule or visits to your psychiatrists on your work calendar?
 

TesTeq

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I literally do not know how i could every get anything done if I had to manually turn 250+ emails per day into tasks. It would be impossible. So what is one to do? Plus Ive been doing this way for 10 years, first with lotus notes, and now with outlook.
I agree. Turning 250+ emails into tasks manually would be overwhelming.
I was using Lotus Notes for my work GTD (so I could quickly convert work emails into work tasks)
and Moleskine/Nokia system for my personal GTD (the number of personal emails was very small in my case).
 

sesteph6

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I see your point.... never really considered that. Interesting. My knee jerk reaction is that Instead of putting an entry like Psychiatrist Apt, Id put APPT with Dr. G. Instead of Divorce payment, Id put Make payment to Susan, etc.

That said I do see your concern now. I guess I would weigh the need to be vague with information vs having multiple inputs.

Great dialog
 

TesTeq

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I see your point.... never really considered that. Interesting. My knee jerk reaction is that Instead of putting an entry like Psychiatrist Apt, Id put APPT with Dr. G. Instead of Divorce payment, Id put Make payment to Susan, etc.

That said I do see your concern now. I guess I would weigh the need to be vague with information vs having multiple inputs.

Great dialog
Thank you! I was always using separate systems to avoid the "manual encryption" of my personal tasks. I was afraid that I would lose the "encryption keys" (my mental associations) for some of them. ;-)
 

Oogiem

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I was afraid that I would lose the "encryption keys" (my mental associations) for some of them. ;-)
The cryptographer in me says that with existing natural language processing no amount of human defined encryption techniques will be sufficient to keep private data private. The only safeguard is that you increase the noise to signal ratio and are not a person of interest and are not in an industry or company that is under any cloud of investigation.
 

rodxmas

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Agreed! Decades ago, I was doing sales for this financial services company whose preferred method of firing sales reps was to intercept them when they were away from their desks, do the deed , and get them out of the building. Once gone, these vultures would rifle through their desks looking for sales contacts and leads. While I never met that fate, it did enforce upon me that my information could become someone else's very easily!

Rod; With that in mind, do you have your own Outlook installation? Is your workplace a bring-your-own-device?

Thank you for your perspective! I have a company owned laptop with BYOD for my phone outlook synchs to my phone via MobileIron.
 

rodxmas

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I see your point.... never really considered that. Interesting. My knee jerk reaction is that Instead of putting an entry like Psychiatrist Apt, Id put APPT with Dr. G. Instead of Divorce payment, Id put Make payment to Susan, etc.

That said I do see your concern now. I guess I would weigh the need to be vague with information vs having multiple inputs.

Great dialog
Thanks a lot for your input. Ultimately your approach is what I have decided on and will work best for me. It is also very similar to what I am doing currently.
 

John Ismyname

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Thank you for your perspective! I have a company owned laptop with BYOD for my phone outlook synchs to my phone via MobileIron.

Outlook on a laptop is a great GTD platform as it is portable.

I average 250-350 emails per day. many of which have to be turned into actions or delegated and tracked

A lot of people, including me are in that boat. With so much “incoming fire”, I mean @ inboxes coming from email, it is a necessity in having your GTD platform on Outlook (or similar platform).

If I was in your position, I would use my employers’ assigned laptop to run my personal email (as a separate account), calendar (you can run multiple calendars on Outlook with a unified view), and tasks (you can run multiple Outlook task lists that are unified in the To-Do list. I’d do a one-way synch to put this all in an accessible cloud storage and ap.

You could even set-up your Outlook file of personal data (the *.pst) to run of an external thumb drive on a USB port. The premise would be that the thumb drive is your property containing your data. If you step-away from your computer, you take the thumb drive with you.

I am also a private data is private and don't trust cloud systems at all so I would put personal information onto a computer that is controlled by someone else. I've been in places where when people were let go everything was locked down and you could never get to your personal data.


Agreed. It is getting harder to keep data private. If it’s your data on your USB stick in your pocket, then it is yours. (I had an interesting issue with this once. Look up “color of intent” in a legal dictionary if you are bored.) Some Google AdSense banner ads indicate that Google has gotten into my personal non-Gmail email. The kicker was a road-trip my wife and I took. 10 hours driving over two days. There were AdSense banner ads the next day of what my wife and I talked about on our trip! My point is that unless you are going to explicitly keep data off-line and transfer it through USB drives, it will find itself in the hands of the GAFA - Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple.
 

Gardener

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and what exactly has all that privacy gotten you? convenience and cost you can actually hold onto

For some people, privacy may allow them to keep their jobs. It's far from unthinkable to imagine a boss acting on evidence that an employee is a member of the 'wrong' political party, donating money to the 'wrong' political causes, being the 'wrong' religion, having certain illnesses, etc. It's no doubt illegal to take action based on most of those, but that doesn't mean it's inconceivable.
 

SDH

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I have my work stuff on my Outlook calendar and my personal stuff on a Google calendar. I have my Google calendar set up so it shows up in Outlook, so that when I need to schedule a work thing I can overlay work and personal calendars to make sure I’m not scheduling a conference call when I have a doctor appointment. On my iPhone, I just have to click which calendar I want it to show up in. Easy peasy.
 

John Ismyname

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SDH; Thanks for pointing this out. One can run a separate work and personal calendars and use system "views" to overlay them. Outlook can do this. The indigenous calendar ap on Android can do this. As you point out, iPhone can do this too!.
 

Mila

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Hello Everyone!

I work for a large corporation with a very secure outlook system. The issue I am having is that for work I am required to use the outlook calendar. At the moment I also put my personal appointments in the same calendar. I have a couple of issues. First, is privacy. I am diligent about marking personal things as private but there are still those with access or at least I get comments well it was a private appointment so I scheduled over. The thinking is that if you mark it as private you are likely just schedule blocking. I tried to use google calendar along with outlook and publish my outlook calendar to google. The publishing worked but then I could not change any professional appointments on google cal and the synching was spotting at best using synqya. Looking for either workflow or tool solutions.

thank you!
Rod

Hi Rod,
have you tried one tool/software which centralizes all of your emails so you can keep personal accounts from work?

I personally, don't like the mixture of personal and corporate data in one account. I use one personal kanban tool/GTD where I can put all of my Gmail and Outlook (O365) accounts, and I have like 10 active emails.

Cheers,
Mila
 

John Ismyname

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Hello Mila; Please tell us about this tool and I will tell you about my ... Outlook productivity tool.
It is absurd that Outlook does not have a unified inbox view that does this. One can buy add-ins to do this. I made my own in VBS but then there are times when I would rather not be staring at my personal email when I should be looking at just my work email.

My simple to for this is
1. type into the "search" field in Outlook-email the following command - folder: (Inbox).
2. in the upper left corner, click the "All mailboxes' button.

This will give you a unified view of all of your Outlook mailboxes, which is very useful in GTD when one processes all inboxes to zero.

Outlook hold the previous six searches in memory. Thus, if you do this frequently, you do not need to re-type it. It is an Outlook command worth committing to memory.

- John

P.S. Your home page looks interesting! I have tried every health / body building supplement that seems remotely legitimate :)
 
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