Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to Get Organized and Stay Organized

Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 to Get ...

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Editorial Reviews

If you re bogged down by unrelenting e-mail messages, conflicting commitments, and endless interruptions, it s not too late to reclaim control of your workday and take back your life! By applying the same time management and productivity techniques used by leading companies, you can better manage all of your communications, action items, and interactions. In this book, productivity expert Sally McGhee shows you how to take control and reclaim something you thought you had lost forever: your work-life balance. Now you can benefit from Sally s popular and highly regarded corporate education programs, learning simple but powerful techniques for rebalancing your personal and professional commitments by using the latest productivity features in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007. Learn the proven methods that empower you to clear away distractions and loose ends and focus on what s really important to you and your business. You will discover what defines, and what limits, your personal productivity and learn how to create your own management system. Examine how you collect and store information, process and organize your e-mail messages for efficiency, and plan and prioritize with the calendar features in Office Outlook 2007. Learn what thousands of people worldwide have discovered about taking control of their everyday productivity, and start transforming your own life today! Includes a tear-out poster of the proven McGhee Productivity Solutions Workflow Model suitable for keeping right next to your desk.

Helps you understand what defines, and what limits, your personal productivity

Demonstrates how to make Office Outlook 2007 part of an effective and highly personalized system for managing the constant stream of information that flows across your desktop

Delivers the same powerful personal organization techniques from a popular corporate training class taught in some of the world s most successful companies

Offers an engaging, easy-to-read style for users of all levels

Applies concepts and models from the fields of behavioral psychology and education

Customer Reviews

Great for helping you utilize Outlook to it's fullest

Reviewed by Christine B, 2010-03-10

A helpful guide to setting up Outlook to maximum advantage, providing a schema for managing emails, tasks and workflow in an efficient and centralized manner. Haven't fully mastered it yet myself, but it has provided me with a toolset to manage the chaos of too many emails, voicemails and projects that so many managers face today!

Awesome Productivity Enhancer... if you'll make the investment

Reviewed by Rich Mcadams, 2010-02-14

This book is NOT a Microsoft Outlook book! It lays out a methodology for determining what are truly you're unifying objectives, both personal and professional, and then it helps you get organized around only those things that support those objectives. If it doesn't support a unifying objective, then don't do it (delegate, go back and renegotiate the committment, etc). While I said this is not an Outlook book, it IS a book that will teach you to use all that Outlook has to offer in terms of managing e-mail, your to-do list, your calendar, etc... ALL in the name of accomplishing your unifying objectives.

If you're like me (4,500 e-mails in my inbox when I read this book), it will take a significant investment in time to adopt this methodology. I spent the better part of the week between Christmas and New Years reading, organizing, deleting, etc to put the system in place. Here's the bottom line: IT HAS MADE AN AMAZING DIFFERENCE IN MY PRODUCTIVITY. I spend far more time working on things that support my goals and far less on distractions.

IF you read the book and decide to implement the McGhee Productivity Solutions Workflow Model, I strongly suggest you purchase the accompanying $59 Outlook Add-in... it adds some great features to Outlook that make processing e-mail SOOO much faster. I downloaded the add-on trial and used it for 30 minutes before realizing just the Quick-File feature alone was well worth the cost... then I learned how to use the other half dozen features.

GREAT book to get organized... but like any productivity methodology, if you think you can read the book, not make any changes in how you do things, and then expect magic to happen, don't bother.

Disappointing and not worth the money

Reviewed by christmas baby, 2010-01-10

I read David Allen's "Getting Things Done" a few months ago and thought it was a great book. I discovered when implementing it, though, that I was struggling w/ how to best manage my lists in a computerized form. In his book, Allen mentioned using Outlook but didn't give any details. I briefly tried it, but I had an old version of the program and was frustrated by its limitations. I then tried creating Excel spreadsheets which helped in monitoring projects but required manual effort on my part to incorporate the info into my calendar. I recently updated to Office 2007 and decided to give Outlook another try but was still struggling w/ how to manage projects and subprojects. Allen's $75 download would fix this, but I kept thinking that I could manage w/o it if I better understood the intricacies of Outlook.

I first heard about "Take Back Your Life" when researching books on Outlook. While the reviews were mixed, I thought that the comments in the positive ones indicated a good choice for me. There are some good points in the book, but I was disappointed overall.

PROS
- Does give specific steps as to how to use Outlook for managing projects, subprojects, and actions.

- Does give guidance as to how to determine which projects and actions will help
you achieve your goals. Allen talks a little about this in his book, but doesn't describe a process for determining your goals.

CONS
- McGhee's terminology often seems pretentious to me and the book is unnecessarily wordy. You use the Unifying Goal to define Areas of Focus and then create Meaningful Objectives which you accomplish through Strategic Next Actions. While she doesn't repeat large blocks of text, there is frequent repetition of small items. This book could benefit from a good edit.

- McGhee's primary target seems to be an employee in a large corporation. While she does discuss personal objectives, she mostly focuses on professional objectives and a large portion of her book discusses corporate goals, meetings w/ your manager, sharing your information through the company server, etc. Most of this was of little interest to me because I'm starting up my own small business and have no other employees. Even if I did work for a large corporation, though, I found a lot of these sections to be wordy and repetitive.

- Her computer screen figures either need to be larger or to have more contrast. I chose the paperback version over the Kindle version because I was concerned about being able to see the detail but still had difficulty reading some of the information.

- The process of gathering info for input is not as detailed as it should be. I used the GTD method, but someone unfamiliar w/ it might be confused by McGhee's description.

- One of the things that makes GTD more effective than most books on this subject is was that you initially focus on getting outstanding tasks taken care of (from the bottom up) rather than going through the process of first developing goals and objectives (from the top down). Allen says that the latter is better theoretically, but he's found the former to be better from a practical standpoint because it reduces the psychic clutter. I've definitely found this to be true for me. Also, as I've accomplished items on my to do list, I've been able to incorporate some goal setting into my regular planning sessions. While setting Meaningful Objectives can help you focus your energies on accomplishing those things that are truly important to you, I found myself getting bogged down in this much longer process.

Overall, I found this book to be of minimal use. I would still like to be able to use Outlook as is and am going to check out "Total Workday Control" by Michael Linenberg, but I may have to bite the bullet and purchase the GTD add in.

A valuable book on time management and organization

Reviewed by Paulo S Abreu, 2009-10-23

This is a great book on time management and application of the GTD "philosophy" with the MS Outlook e-mail application.
The authors do not limit the discussion to MS Outlook configuration. In this sense, this is not a technical book, which is good.
Time Management (and for that matter, GTD) is a much broader approach and is not limited to specific tools.
So the authors discuss how you should organize and plan yourself first from a higher perspective. For example, how to manage interruptions (and, yes, that includes the automatic new e-mail alerts), how to manage your (several) collecting points (inboxes, if you will), etc.
Along the discussion the use of MS Outlook is explained. Note that if you don't use MS Outlook this could still be a useful book, because you could easily adapt the concepts to any other e-mail system.
Things like the Weekly Review, which was always a mysterious concept to me, become much clearer with the authors approach.
This may not be "the definitive guide" to getting organized and time management, but I have gone back to the book several times to check steps and reinforce some concepts. Hence, it is a valuable book to have, if you have not decided for one yet.
Good reading.

It works

Reviewed by Michael J. Furay, 2008-09-13

Before 1,100 email in inbox with a total Outlook folder size of 500 MB
After 80 or less emails in inbox with a total Outlook folder size of 350 MB.

Even after only reading 1/4th of this book there was an immediate change in my work life. After reading all of the book my personal life started to improve.

The only negative to this book is that it's so simple you'll wonder why you paid money for this information. However it's worth every penny you spend. I was even able to relay the concepts to other people to implement and these people saw an immediate improvement without even reading the book by just listening to what I could recite from my readings.