Fear and Dread for Outlook 12
My biggest fear is that Outlook 12 will be forced upon me by my company before Netcentrics finishes the update of the add-in.
The discussions on the above referenced blog pretty much prove to me that the Microsoft crew doesn't get it. What I see are a bunch of bells and whistles that don't add any functionality. I've pretty much been doing what they say they are adding with custom fields and views for the last five years.
Their approach seems to violate a fundamental principle of GTD. Getting In to Empty. Their approach is e-mail centric. Leave everything in IN and manage it from there... "You'll never have to leave your inbox"...
A second problem is a complete abdication of the critical need to be able to make a distinction between next actions and projects. The suggestion that we need MS Project to handle projects is nuts. The current discussion on why a focus area/project/subproject/next action isn't needed has recieved a fair amount of flak on the blog and rightly so. I find it odd that in the Wednesday, November 30, 2005 blog entry they list "3. Organize by Project" as one of the key principles for the update, but then fail to include any functionality that allows you to do so.
A third is their total over-reliance on categories. The suggestions is you can categorize by keyword, by project, by focus area, by subproject, by client etc. If you start using Categories for all of this, you've totally overloaded this one under-designed functional part of Outlook.
For those of us who still use the Palm, overloading categories just doesn't work anyway.
Fourth, and this probably hasn't been thought of is that the GTD add-in has some great features that really speed inbox processing. For those of us who average 100-300+ e-mails a day losing those abilities will truely be a productivity drain...
I'll keep my fingers crossed...
