What is Toluu?
Toluu is a free service for sharing the feeds you read and discovering new ones.		 Get Invite

Manage This!

Management and Productivity Forum


Handy Outlook Attachment Reminder MacroSeptember 18

Have you ever had one of those “oh shit” moments where two seconds after sending an email you realized something was missing?  And you know, by using the Outlook “Recall Message” feature, you’re just going to draw even more attention to your mistake.  It’s like a highway accident… people will open recalled messages before anything else in their Inbox just to see what you might have screwed up.

Here’s one easy way to prevent that from happening: use this Outlook VBA macro to automatically scan your outgoing messages and stop incomplete emails & invites before they get sent.   This macro will check for missing attachments on messages & meeting invites where you probably meant to attach something.  It will also check for blank subject lines, as well as blank locations in meeting invites. (more…)

Bookmark It



Discount on ClearContext IMS Pro!July 21

Good news! The folks at ClearContext are offering Manage-This! readers a $15 discount on their ClearContext IMS Pro v4 product that is good through August 31st, 2008. Just enter the “managethis” coupon code when checking out.

Also, rest assured that anyone who purchases IMS Pro v4 will receive a complimentary upgrade to ClearContext Professional when it is released. Enjoy!

Bookmark It



ClearContext and My Quest for an Empty InboxJuly 20

In a previous post I talked about my quest for an empty inbox and all the tools I tried along the way. Well, I’m at it again. My previous tool of choice, Taglocity, has taken a turn toward online social/collaborative email in their 2.0 release. I’m afraid that 99% of the email I handle is work related, and our big lumbering IT department would never allow a rogue server, inside or outside the firewall, collecting corporate data. Likewise, getting said lumbering IT department to establish their own server would be equally unlikely. The social/collaborative approach might be the next big thing, but I need help now. The final nail in the coffin was that some of the features that originally sold me on Taglocity 1.x are no longer supported in their 2.0 beta release. Given the new direction, those features won’t likely return.

So where does that leave me? Well, I went back to my notes and started to think about what kind of help I really need. Here are the requirements I came up with:

  1. Need a quick way to triage and file email. Filing must be effortless, otherwise I will resist doing it
  2. Needs to be a stable tool that works well with Outlook 2003 (yes, I’m still stuck there… see comment above related to the big lumbering IT department).
  3. Need to strip out the spam and low-priority reference email & noti
DROE Tool now supports EverNote, and much more!July 15

I just released a new version of the Daily Record of Events (DROE) note taking tool.  This release adds support for EverNote and text-based DROE files, as well as enhancements for the OneNote DROE.

From the README file, here is a summary of what changed in v0.4 (Beta). For complete details, download the README file. To get your own copy of the tool, see the Downloads page.

  • NEW FEATURE: Added support for a completely text-based DROE without the need for OneNote. This includes a quick edit window.
  • NEW FEATURE: Added support for EverNote… DROE Tool can send text notes to EverNote using EverNote’s auto-import feature
  • NEW FEATURE: The amount of white space between notes is now configurable in the INI file.
  • NEW FEATURE: “Clip Mode” causes any selected text to be clipped and included in the DROE entry. For OneNote DROE files, selected images are also sent to the DROE.
  • NEW FEATURE: WIN+LeftArrow now summons a new control panel that makes it easy to update settings in the INI file and reload the tool.
  • Bug fix: Fixed issue with cursor bein
Handwriting Recognition in OneNote 2007? Well, kinda…March 30

In my post on EverNote vs. OneNote, I mentioned handwriting recognition as one of the shortcomings in OneNote. I also mentioned that the implementation in EverNote is a bit disappointing as well because it uses a “shotgun” word approach. By that I mean that EverNote sets up an XML database of sorts where many possible words (most of them completely wrong) are attached to each handwritten word. If you search on any of those words, it will come up as a hit on that part of the image. You may be initially impressed when it magically finds the correct word when you search on that word, but the excitement fades when you realize lots of other words that aren’t even close will match as well. As I mentioned before, I do give the EverNote team a lot of credit for even attempting this, it’s just not quite good enough yet to be useful.

Having said that, the EverNote implementation did give me an interesting idea. Even though I capture a good percentage of my notes electronically using the DROE Tool, I still find it impossible to move away from handwritten notes entirely. There are too many situations where I either don’t have my laptop, or it’s not convenient or polite to use it. (I’m also too cheap to invest in a fancy image capture pen or tablet PC.) So here is my poor man’s solution…

I scan my hand-written Daily