Jarrett House North

Getting Things Done with Outlook 2007, revisited

A while ago I posted a few things that I found about implementing the GTD methodology with Outlook. Since I recently changed jobs, I’ve had an opportunity to carry some of the best practices forward as well as start from ground zero (a true Inbox Zero!) in some other areas. Here’s a quick roundup of what I did on my brand new inbox to facilitate maximum productivity.

The very first thing I did was to download and install Taglocity, which has saved my bacon so many times. I don’t know why people who design software to manage large volumes of information don’t get this, so I’ll just say why I find this so superior to the built-in Categories feature: it is much much faster to type in multiple tags for an inbound email than it is to make multiple mouse movements to pick multiple categories from a list. It’s fundamentally the same principle as why Keyword Assistant is absolutely necessary with iPhoto (at least, pre-2008). Email may be full text searchable, but from an actionability standpoint it’s just as opaque as photos until you give it context through tags. And the more tags, frankly, the better. All the UIs that assume that you’ll only be assigning one or two categories or tags are fundamentally broken because they don’t help solve the problem of how to find something later.

The second thing I did was to create exactly one sub-folder in my Inbox, called _archive. The underscore is a habit; it’s left over from when I had a billion subfolders and wanted to be sure my Archive folder bubbled to the top of the list.

The third piece was adopting the discipline that I’ve learned from practicing a little (a very little) GTD:

Scan each mail for actionability.
If it’s calendar related, triage it (right now that means “accept it” but a more complex triage process is required as my calendar actually gets full).
If it’s a task, do it quickly (< 2 min) or tag it and add it to the task list.
If it’s useful reference, tag it and add it into the archive.
If it’s none of those things, delete it.

Lastly, I set up a few smart folders: Tag folders (smart folders that look at categorized items across all my mailboxes, created through Taglocity) for all my projects; a smart mailbox for Unread Mail and for Unread or For Follow Up items. Today, I added one other smart mailbox—items in my inbox that weren’t flagged, meaning that they hadn’t been processed or moved to the task list. I also set up a custom Shortcut bar and added task age to my To Do list view. The last three items were based on the helpful advice from David Ornstein in this blog post.

Some stuff I might try to do in the future: custom button bars based on the posts by Simon Guest (and again) and Omar Shahine, and maybe tweak some of my task creation settings based on the advice by Melissa Macbeth.

And what has fallen by the wayside? The Hipster PDA was cool for about five minutes. I’ve graduated, on those occasions where I don’t have my laptop, to a little Moleskine notebook. But increasingly everything goes directly into Outlook. Likewise, I’m not bothering with the customized Project form hack mentioned in the same old post; it never worked well enough under Outlook XP for me to try bringing it forward into Office 2007.

And I’m on the edge about Google Desktop; while I was hooked on it before, I’m starting to think critically about the tradeoff between security and functionality that it provides, and I’m not sure I like the conclusions I’m drawing. More later.

Getting to Inbox Zero with Outlook and Taglocity

A follow up to my earlier note about tags and Microsoft Outlook: I am happy to say that Taglocity has changed my life. I used to have folders in folders in folders and dealing with any received mail was torture. Now I’ve implemented tags and my workflow has totally changed.

I used to deal only with my unread mail, which was nice but it meant crud built up in my inbox. I used to flag mail messages as To Dos, but half the time I never got to reviewing the To Do list. Now I tag each mail message as it comes in (unless Taglocity can tag it for me), take whatever action is necessary on it, and move it to one archive folder. If I need to see a collection of messages about a particular subject, I use Taglocity’s filters or have it create a search folder for me.

My morning routine is a lot simpler too. I come in in the morning and the only things in my inbox are the ones that have come in since the night before. I delete most of the bacn, tag anything that I responded to the prior evening through Outlook Web Access (which doesn’t support tags), archive all tagged messages, and start processing all the new stuff.

The best part: that empty inbox. Now I work from my action list like I should have been doing all along. Inbox Zero is a good thing.

Some specific notes on Taglocity: using the Tag Cloud and other parts of the UI to assign tags and filters is a little challenging, since I tend to have a lot of tags. As in my tag collection in iPhoto, I find typing the tag name to be much, much easier. But having a Tag Cloud for my email is kind of cool anyway.

Outlook tags

I am an email junkie. There, I said it. So the question is, what to do about it?

I have two problems with my work email (home is a story for a different day). First, I tend to save every message that isn’t outright spam or one-word answers—and it’s only recently that I started deleting the latter. Second, I have a file folder for everything, a habit that I started back when I first used Eudora in the mid-90s. It’s the second habit that is especially bad; it doesn’t scale worth a tinker’s when you are receiving over a hundred messages a day that are non-spam. (Yeah, I know. I threw up a little in my mouth when I wrote that.)

So what to do? First thing for me that really has helped is installing Google Desktop on my Windows machine. Much faster than the native Windows search engine, and with the double-control-key quick lookup, much easier to get into and use. But the next thing is to eliminate folders, and that is proving much harder. Because often the title line or even the content of an email doesn’t tell me which customer or software release it is in reference to, Google Desktop can’t find everything.

So I’m going to start exploring tagging. After all, it works well for me for Flickr/iPhoto. Here are some quick links about tagging hacks in Outlook:

Tagging Outlook tasks
Email tagging using categories and a custom edit-in-cell view
Taglocity, a commercial tagging solution with a limited free edition, including auto-tagging

Somewhere there is another tool that I really liked at Microsoft—it collapsed all the messages in a thread into a single mail message, deleted all the redundant text, and trashed the original messages. Now that’s efficient.

Great mysteries of life: WPF edition

The Windows Presentation Foundation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework 3.0 gives you a lot of bang for the buck—for instance, it includes a free spell checker. Unfortunately, you sometimes get what you pay for. There is no ability to add a custom dictionary in the current version of the spellchecker. There also appears to be no documentation on which dictionary the information is being drawn from, where it is stored on disk—even where the ignore list for an individual user is stored.

So I tried some experiments: I created a Windows Search index over my AppData folder, opened a WPF application, and told it to ignore a misspelled word. I then searched for the misspelled word in my AppData folder and didn’t find it—meaning that the file containing the ignore list was not stored there. I even searched the registry and didn’t find the word. So where is it stored? It’s not in the base framework folders either...

Scripting data from SQL Server tables as DML

(Warning: technical post ahead.) Ever since leaving the PowerBuilder/Sybase/ERWin world behind, something I’ve missed is the ability to easily generate portable SQL scripts for populating a table with test data. There are plenty of solutions in SQL Server for migrating data—DTS/Integration Services, BCP, and others. But DTS and Integration Services have to be maintained in the increasingly clumsy SQL utilities and cannot be easily inspected to see if things have changed, and BCP is opaque—you can’t really examine a BCP result file in any easy way to see what the data looks like within. No, give me DML—even if it’s bulky, a long list of INSERT/UPDATE statements has the advantage of being easily readable and even modifiable.

Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy way using the Microsoft tools to produce DML from existing data in a table; all the scripting support in the old SQL Enterprise Manager and the new SQL Server Management Studio are aimed at producing DDL scripts that create or modify the tables. Management Studio in SQL Server 2005 will create template scripts for insert or update scripts, but won’t actually put data into them—a curious omission.

SQL Scripter to the rescue. This nifty app offers the ability to script the data from any or all tables from a database as insert, update, or insert when new/update when existing statements. There’s even features for export of the data to CSV, Excel, and PDF. Pretty cool for a free utility. I’m now changing my process for creating a new demo database to use SQL Scripter to move my demo data from one environment to another.

Vista update: CSCService kills puppies

Following up on my earlier post about built in system services sucking CPU: when we last left the story I had disabled the Offline Files service, better known as CSCService, as a likely candidate for my regular out-of-resources situation. Four days later, it looks clear that CSCService is the culprit. I have had no resource errors, no forced reboots, or anything like the pain I was experiencing.

This isn’t to say that life is roses now. Vista is still slow and seems to get slower (to the point of being almost unresponsive) under relatively light loads. But it recovers now and it never did.

So the next question is, what caused this process’s CPU and memory consumption to render the system unavailable, and why did it go haywire in the first place? I don’t know the answer to the second question, but I can only suspect that there’s something in my list of offline files that caused the service to start killing my system. I’ll try purging the list and reactivating the feature to see what happens.

But the other question: I’m pretty sure that the unresponsiveness has to do with the fact that CSCService was running in the same process space with half a dozen other services, including the window manager. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, as Juliette Lewis said in Natural Born Killers. I think I read something about changing the affinity setting for svchost processes in the registry to prevent this behavior; that might be the other thing worth trying to get the feature working again.

For now, I’m just happy that the perp has been fingered.

Heh: towel flap

Who knew: the Microsoft gym towel flap turned into a real turnaround in Microsoft HR.

Microsoft screws up an Office Online feature launch by simulshipping it with an announcement of a delay in the Mac version of Office. How can Microsoft be surprised at the reaction that got?

A possible solution to Vista issues

My previous exploration of Vista service packs and hotfixes led nowhere close to fixing my Vista issues. I was a little dejected for a while. But now I may have something to go on.

Excel 2007 just locked up on me today, as did Outlook. Recognizing the symptoms of an incipient total freeze-up of the system, I went in to take a look at the Task Manager. This once, I caught the conditions early enough that I was able to launch it and do some exploration. I quickly found a svchost process that was consuming a fair percentage of CPU (around 33%), and more troubling was also consuming memory—as I watched and investigated, it climbed from around 33 MB to over 60 MB.

I ran tasklist to see what that svchost process was running (svchost can run multiple services), but couldn’t figure out which process was the problem one. I found that if I right clicked on the process on the Process tab and chose Services, it would take me to the first service in the list that was running in that process. I then sorted the list of services by PID, opened a command prompt, and started net stopping the services owned by that PID systematically.

I found a few surprises; for instance, if you stop the uxsms process, which is responsible for the window manager, your screen goes totally black—but still accepts keyboard input. I was able to type in net start uxsms and bring back up the window manager. But none of the services I stopped fixed the climbing memory consumption, until I hit pcasvc, which is a service that is provided for compatibility with older versions of Windows. When I stopped the service, the memory usage stopped climbing and fell back, and I was able to do a clean reboot—though my Excel session never recovered.

A search indicates that other users have trouble with the same svchost process, though they indicate other culprits (ReadyBoost is one that gets mentioned). So there may be something going on here.

Update: Further testing indicates another possible culprit, which I disabled at the same time: CSCService, which supports Offline Files. It now appears pcasvc is OK. We’ll see if disabling CSCService does the trick.

Databound menu item names in XAML

I keep telling the engineers who work with me that once we ship, we’ll have to write some articles with all the tips and tricks that we’ve discovered in Microsoft’s .NET Framework v.3, specifically WPF and WCF. The technology is easy enough to use, as I’ve written before, that even a product manager can do it.

My engineers challenged me to find a way to dynamically bind the name of our application into the menus, so that we would not have to update the menu names separately when we changed the code name of the product to the final released name. After some playing around, it turns out to be pretty trivial. As in my About Box example, you have to reference the AssemblyInfo class, which has the name of the assembly as a property that can be databound. Then it’s just a question of databinding the name to the menu.

With the way that menus are created by default in Expression Blend, this can look tricky because the text that is shown is in a parameter of the MenuItem tag called Header. What you have to remember is that WPF allows you to embed other controls into various contexts, but that you generally have to be explicit about how you’re doing it. So your code might have started out looking like this:

<MenuItem Header="_Help">
  <MenuItem Header="_About MyProgramName"/>
  <MenuItem Header="MyProgramName Help"/>
</MenuItem>

After you break out the header element and embed the databound names, it ends up looking like this:

<MenuItem Header="_Help">
  <MenuItem>
    <MenuItem.Header>
       <TextBlock>
          <TextBlock Text="About " />
          <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Info.Title, Mode=Default, Source={StaticResource ApplicationBaseDS}}" />
       </TextBlock>
    </MenuItem.Header>
  </MenuItem>
  <MenuItem>
     <MenuItem.Header>
        <TextBlock>
           <TextBlock Text="{Binding Path=Info.Title, Mode=Default, Source={StaticResource ApplicationBaseDS}}" />
           <TextBlock Text=" Help" />
        </TextBlock>
     </MenuItem.Header>
  </MenuItem>
</MenuItem>

It’s probably obvious enough to an experienced WPF programmer, but I found no ready references for making this happen so I figured I’d give it back to Google.

End in sight to reboot hell?

I have been struggling with Windows Vista for a month or two. Regularly the system ran out of resources, regularly reboots were required to re-enable functionality. The symptoms were eerily reminiscent of classic GDI resource heap exhaustion: windows would refuse to open, pop-up menus stubbornly stayed closed, applications reported an inability to save to disk or access the registry.

I am now trying various patches to see if I can fix the problem. After a blue screen of death (yes, those still happen on Vista), it occurred to me that the problem must be in a device driver; after all, that code gets to play at a privileged OS level where it can do things like attempt to overwrite read-only memory. I suspected the video driver, and attempted to use an update from Intel’s web site to update the driver (for the record, it’s the Intel Mobile Chipset 945), but was told that the upgrade was not installable on my machine (an HP Compaq NC6320 laptop).

Now I am getting a message from the Windows problem reporting system that one of my issues may be fixed by a hotfix for KB 931671. We’ll see if this does fix the problem, or if I continue down the path of no return with this OS. Already not a good sign: I am being forwarded for the second time in a 20 minute call to another department because the reps I have been speaking to are not authorized to distribute the hotfix.

Vista: Very, very hungry

I run Windows Vista at the office. Generally I get along with it just fine, and our company’s software plays pretty happily with it. But every now and then in my daily work I hit some kind of wall. Sometimes it manifests as a problem with Microsoft Outlook: when I try to launch Word to read an attachment, it starts up the Office Installer instead, then complains that it is suffering from "Windows Installer error 1450" and can’t proceed. Cancelling or clicking OK brings me to the same place: a copy of Word that complains that it hasn’t been installed for the current Windows user.

Other times, the problem manifests as a refusal to open other software applications, even Notepad, or to open new explorer windows. When I hit this point, even clicking on the funky little restart menu to try to get to the restart menu option won’t open the submenu. I have to hold the power key down to force the power to cycle.

It feels for all the world like the bad old days of Windows 3.1 or Windows 95 when one of the system resource heaps would be exhausted. But that shouldn’t be happening in Vista, or any post-NT OS, for that matter.

What’s weird is that applications that are already open, e.g. Firefox, appear to run just fine as long as you keep them running.

I can’t find anything on Microsoft.com or on the web at large about the issue, so I’m posting something to jog my own memory the next time I run into the problem.

Product managers writing code, and other scary things

When your product manager checks code into your source control project, it means one of three things:

Your engineering team is short-handed.
Your project is really in trouble.
Your development environment is really, really easy to use.

While I’m not sure that #2 isn’t true, I found #3 to be absolutely true working on a recent software release with my team. We’re using the Windows Presentation Foundation, aka Avalon, and I used Microsoft’s Expression Blend to make the project’s About window.

WPF is designed to enforce separation of code and presentation, and tools like Expression Blend enable that. The presentation markup enabled me to automatically include the current assembly information (version number, product name, copyright string), plus free memory information, and even a little animation.

The trick was in learning how to do data binding. I specified various modules of the .NET Framework as data sources, then bound text objects to methods in the framework. Interestingly, the easiest way to get assembly information was in the Microsoft.VisualBasic.ApplicationServices namespace, in a class called AssemblyInfo; of course it doesn’t matter since the same code can be accessed by any .NET compatible language, including C#. The only challenge came in showing the available memory, since the methods in Microsoft.VisualBasic.Devices.ComputerInfo return memory in bytes. I wanted to show the information in megabytes, so I attached some simple C# code as a converter to represent the information in megabytes and format it appropriately for the user’s region.

Like I said: simple.

Holy crap: an honest to goodness Easter egg

Thanks to Macintouch, I just spent a virtual eternity (okay, five minutes, but these days that feels like an eternity) playing Asteroids. The original Asteroids. Tucked away inside Microsoft Office 2004.

Word was a while back that Microsoft had put a moratorium on Easter eggs. I wonder how the team slipped this one in. I wonder whether Rick Schaut would have anything to say on the topic, if we asked him nicely.

Thought for the day: Platform lock-in, good and bad

A review of a new PowerShell book on Slashdot features a great comment from an anonymous coward who gives the best argument against supporting multiple platforms that I’ve ever read:

I hate re-using code because it forces me to solve new problems every day. I'd rather create new value on Mondays only, and then spend the rest of the week re-doing the same work on my other platforms. It gives my mind a chance to rest, and I can drink heavily mid-week and still be able to do my job.

I sure hope they charge extra for it, make it a resource hog, lock out third-party extensions, and then discontinue it as soon as I'm dependent on it. I really liked the 1980s and look forward to reliving them.

The nice thing about the comment is that it contains the pro and con of supporting multiple system architectures back to back, and both perspectives are funny, and true.

Webex Outlook Addin and Outlook 2007

If, like me, you live and die by Webex, you might have been as frustrated as I was to find that the Outlook add-in for Webex (which allows you to schedule online meetings right from your Outlook calendar) doesn’t install on Outlook 2007. I was quite surprised to find this, actually, since I had happily been running it on my old computer. But I realized I had actually migrated it—I had originally installed it against Outlook 2003, and it had happily continued to work when I upgraded to Outlook 2007.

So I hacked my way into making it work. Basically all you have to do is start from a working installation of the add-in (downloadable from your Webex account page), then copy the binary files from the Webex program files directory to the machine with Outlook 2007, register the DLLs, then add a registry entry that registers the add-in. On my machine, the registry entry for the last step looks like this:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\OutlookAddin.Addin]
"FriendlyName"="ADOutlook2K Addin"
"Description"="ATLCOM Outlook Addin"
"LoadBehavior"=dword:00000003
"CommandLineSafe"=dword:00000000

Note that installing this WILL NOT work unless the DLLs from the add-in have properly been registered.

Once I did the above steps, I simply recorded my sign-in information and was able to start scheduling meetings again. Yee haw.

Update: Apparently WebEx has fixed this issue, though it doesn’t explain why I had to hack and post about it before anyone told us that it was an issue, much less that they had fixed it. Sigh.