Automating Daily Tasks in Outlook

For sometime now I’ve been thinking about the best way of handling recurring daily tasks. I’ve been using the Getting Things Done (GTD) system for years and am really “in the flow� these days. But I haven’t really got on top of daily tasks – because they don’t usually make it into my lists. A few days ago, I came across Michael Hyatt’s post on how to do this for Outlook tasks and thought I’d give it a shot. It’s a very simple implementation (using Outlook macros) and works a treat.

There were a few additional things that I added to Michael’s work. Firstly, I created a “Reset Daily Tasks [Do Not Remove]� task (so I actually remember to run the macro each day)! I also added a nice icon for my “Reset Daily Tasks� button in the Outlook toolbar. And finally, I added a link in the notes field of some of the daily tasks to other “reference� tasks e.g. one of my daily tasks is to review my personal goals each day (my personal goals are also stored as a separate Outlook task with the goals in the notes section. So basically I added the following line (in bold)

‘Create Task 1:
Set oMyTaskItem = Application.CreateItem(olTaskItem)
oMyTaskItem.Subject = “1. Review my personal goals”
oMyTaskItem.Body = “Outlook:\\Mailbox – Omer Khan\Tasks\~! Personal Goals>”
oMyTaskItem.Categories = “!Daily Habits”
oMyTaskItem.Importance = 1
oMyTaskItem.Save

This puts a link in the notes section to my personal goals. So now I just open the daily task and click the link to easily access my personal goals.

And if you don’t know, you can easily generate the link to another task manually using the format:

Mailbox Name\Tasks\~Task Name>

Or you can download a free copy of Outlook Linker to do this for you.