Separating Work from Home

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colmbyrne

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Hi

I use outlook at work to manage my tasks with the GTD add-in and sync with my Treo600 palm. However, interspersed is the rest of my life - all the other things I do outside of work.
How can I separate the two without having two systems, so that I can see just work items?
I currently use a prefix 'work:' then the name of the task. But I'd love to hear of any simpler/elegant solutions other than setting up an @work.

Thanks

Colm
 
Separating Work from Home

I seperatate by preceding the Project with a # for Work Projects and an * for Home Projects then Next actions are #(4digit Number) and > for Work Next Actions then *(4digit Number) and >
So it would look like this #0001 Develope Logging System
and #0001> Call: J Doe regarding Planning Meeting

I have filters in Outlook set to show Lists of Tasks with sorting I can see the Project and the Next Action for that project right under it in either the Work realm, Home realm or both. I have modified the GTD police code so that when I check off a next action Outlook asks me if I want to set the following next action is so it opens the project and then creates a new tack with either the # or * and the 4 digit number with the >... ready for me to enter the next action or paste it from the motes section ofthe actual project.

I use CanDo on my palm to achieve musch of the same filtering ability.

I can expand if you would like
 
Before ultimately ditching Outlook altogether (long story), I decided to decouple Outlook from the Palm and maintain two systems: Outlook for the office, and the Palm Desktop for everything else. I do keep an @office list on the Palm, but only for adding things to it when I'm in another context. Once I transferred those items to Outlook, I purge the Palm @office list.

Now I just use the Palm Desktop at work with two accounts: one with my Palm username, and one called "Office." The username desktop account gets synched to the Palm, the Office account doesn't.
 
colmbyrne said:
Hi

I use outlook at work to manage my tasks with the GTD add-in and sync with my Treo600 palm. However, interspersed is the rest of my life - all the other things I do outside of work.
How can I separate the two without having two systems, so that I can see just work items?
I currently use a prefix 'work:' then the name of the task. But I'd love to hear of any simpler/elegant solutions other than setting up an @work.

Thanks

Colm
Click to expand...

I solved this problem by marking all non-work related items Private. Then I set my hotsync options in the conduits so that private items are backed up once per day and do not sync into Outlook. When I am at work, all I see on Outlook are my work-related items If I need to see non-work related items, I look at my Palm. IHTH
 
Okay - the "private" button works. I found a document describing how to set this up to separate work from home including renaming the private button and making two action views one for work and one for home (private ones).

Thanks for your help!
 
Share that document...

please. Or at least a link to it. How to handle work system and home system has been a concern of mine as well, and I'd be interested in seeing the details on how you've dealt with it.

Thanks!
 
colmbyrne said:
Okay - the "private" button works. I found a document describing how to set this up to separate work from home including renaming the private button and making two action views one for work and one for home (private ones).

Thanks for your help!
Click to expand...

I'm curious to know where you found this information. The setup you described would work well in my situation.

Any help you can provide would be most appreciated.

Thanks,
Natalie
 
I've been struggling with this for the past eight years and finally have a somewhat workable solution:

For home and my second job (I run a communications design studio), I use Outlook and a Pocket PC.

For my day job, I've switched over to the Hipster PDA (a.ka., index cards on steroids).

I've been so tired of staring at a computer screen lately that I needed something tactile to keep track of things at the day job. I found that I'm much more prone to write something down than type it in.
 
Brent said:
Why can't you have two systems?
Click to expand...

If your time between the two is clearly divided, there is no reason why you cannot have separate systems. If I was still at my old corporate job, my systems would be completely separate. I might bring my personal system with me to work to look at on breaks, but I wouldn't bring anything from work home. My job was such that I would have benefitted from using GTD, but I never took work home with me. Now that I work for myself, everything is so intertwined, it would be very difficult for me to distinguish between the two. Even having separate next action lists hasn't worked for me because it all ends up being done together anyway.
 
Amish PDA

Just an update. I've modified my Hipster PDA a few times since I last posted and think I have finally developed a system that works for me to effectively balance and track work, home, consulting and fitness.

I don't get into too much detail in this post (not that much is needed), but you can see some photos of what I've done: http://theoutdoorjourney.com/journey/?p=118.

Again, nothing revolutionary. Just elegantly efficient.

hak
 
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