In case no one ever told you, a big part of personal productivity is making decisions. Perhaps nowhere is this truer than in the case of setting your daily and weekly work priorities.

Because not all the tasks on your to-do list are of equal importance, after establishing which (if any) of the timeslots in your day are open, you need to prioritize them. In prioritizing all the tasks on your to-do list, you can apply a series of ranking criteria by considering the following questions:

When using these questions to prioritize the items on your to-do list, begin by first establishing whether or not you do have all the information and supporting materials you need to complete the task. If you do, you can then move on to considering other questions in the list.

If you find that don't have all the info and supporting materials you need, then you have to temporarily stop the prioritizing process so that you can note exactly what's missing and where you can get it. You can then later turn these notes into tasks for your to-do list by scheduling a timeslot for it after evaluating the other prominent tasks on your to-do list. (See Chapter 13 for steps on how to document your thoughts in the Outlook Notes module and then convert the notes you make into tasks on your to-do list.)

If you find that several tasks have the same deadline (as in ASAP or yesterday) or have lingered on your to-do list for some time, you can order them by determining how much time you think each will require to complete and then matching them with the timeslots still open on your daily calendar.

If you find the open timeslots in your workday broken up into sporadic segments by preset meetings and appointments, you'll probably have to determine how you can split up the larger, high-priority task into smaller subtasks. These subtasks need to be ones that you can either complete within these shorter free timeslots or which are amenable to interruption, allowing you to fairly easily break off for a meeting or other appointment and then resume afterward.

On some rare workdays, you may find you aren't looking at any overdue tasks or tasks with specific deadlines. In that case, you then identify all tasks that are prerequisites for completing other tasks that reside either on your to-do list or which you have reassigned to one of your co-workers or team members.

If you don't find any tasks that are prerequisites of others, you then identify those you'd most like to check off your to-do list. These tasks may be ones that you have to deal with on a daily basis, such as reading and answering e-mail, or simply ones that you know you'll feel better after they're done.

Getting your daily priorities straight is certainly an important contributor to the success of your workday.

When deciding how to proceed with a task on your to-do list that you've identified as high priority, you may want to apply the following 3D model:

The biggest obstacles to keeping to any schedule that you come up with are all the interruptions that seem to spring up at the most inopportune moments in a typical workday. Such interruptions can be planned (a regularly scheduled team meeting, one-time seminar, or weekly training class), or they can be completely unexpected (a sudden office or home emergency, very important telephone call from a client, or high-priority e-mail message from the boss).

When dealing with a planned interruption such as a slated meeting or seminar, you're at a decided advantage. You can almost always accommodate the upcoming disruption by purposely not taking on a task or subtask that you know you can't complete before its appointed time or that you can't easily put down and then readily resume after the break.

With an impromptu interruption, you have a lot less time to prepare your response to minimize the effects of the disruption. The best you can do is to quickly mark your place in the task and note down any information that may help you pick up where you leave off after the interruption is over.

To do this, take a moment or two to mark your place and note your comments before you turn your full attention to the new event at hand. In the case of telephone calls or surprise office visits, you can do this by politely asking the other person to give you a second before you're with them.

As any personal productivity expert worth his salt will tell you, one of the more detrimental things to your personal productivity is trying to keep the stuff you have to do in your head. Trying to remember all the tasks, questions, good ideas, and inspirations that suddenly and randomly pop into your head is really taxing (no matter how good your memory is). All too often, it accomplishes little more than adding to your general stress level by making you apprehensive about forgetting something you know really needs to get done or something that's really indispensable to getting something done.

What you need to do instead is give your brain a rest. And the best way to do this is by developing the strict habit of noting every idea that seems like it bears remembering, the moment that idea pops into your head. This includes all tasks you realize you have to do (regardless of when they're due; by the end of the same day or the current fiscal or calendar year), any questions that require answering, along with anything that generally falls into the good idea, intriguing insight, or absolute inspiration category.

This is where using a personal information manager program such as Outlook comes in so handy. In place of a zillion scribbled, indiscriminately placed sticky notes all over your computer monitor, you can safely store all your mental insights as notes in Outlook's Notes module. That way, you not only don't have to worry about being able to read them, but you always know where and how to find them. Moreover, as you discover in Chapter 13, you can easily search Outlook notes, group them into categories, color code them to establish their relative importance, and print them out.

Information overload is a real concern to many business people these days. Although called "information" overload, the real problem isn't too much information so much as too much raw data. And, as I'm accustomed to telling the students in all my database management system classes, raw data is not the same as information.

Raw data represents all the facts and figures, pictures, images, statistics, and reports that human beings feel they simply must record and store somewhere. Most of the time, however, the vast bulk of this data is simply trivia that holds no interest and has little value.

It's only when you develop a need for some of the data that its facts, figures, and so on suddenly become meaningful information for you. This need, by the way, may be temporary, so that once you've mined all the pertinent information for its meaning and put this information to appropriate use, it may once again return to the level of mere data (that you take or leave).

For this reason, you need to master all the electronic search techniques that your personal computer affords you. This includes performing general searches in the Windows operating system as well as specific searches from particular Outlook modules.

Remember the old Boy Scout motto, "Be Prepared"? For the knowledge worker in modern business, I think this maxim has to be updated to something more like, "Be Prepared for Anything." The pace of modern business and the fluctuations it faces are such that nowadays you not only have to anticipate change as an integral part of your job, but you also have to find a way to welcome it on some level.

And if you can't find a way to actually welcome change into your workplace, you have to at least find a way to accommodate it with some modicum of grace. This is because doing anything less is likely to produce intolerable amounts of stress, regardless of how well you keep up with the pace.

How ready you are as a productive knowledge worker rests squarely upon a number of factors:

"Know yourself" is the adage that appeared above the cave of the ancient Greek Oracle of Delphi along with another bit of relevant wisdom, "Nothing in excess." When applied to personal productivity, "know yourself" simply means that you need be aware of the place you're starting from so that you can figure out how far you have to go as well the easiest and fastest ways to get there.

Comprehending the place you're at is simply a matter of assessing your natural strengths and weaknesses when it comes to being productive. Then you can use this knowledge to devise a plan for making the best possible use of these strengths, especially in overcoming or minimizing the effects of the areas where you're not so strong.

For example, if you know that you're a wiz at organizing your home and work spaces but that prioritizing all the things you have to do in a day isn't currently your strong suit, you can use your natural organizational skills to better determine the most efficient order in which to meet your current obligations. Assuming that all the tasks share the same due date (today), here's what you'd do:

When you get right down to it, the goal of personal productivity is simply greater happiness and fulfillment. Increased efficiency, increased output, recognition as an outstanding employee or parent, or even a much-deserved raise may well be natural byproducts of attaining peak personal productivity (although I can't vouch for the raise) but they're not the goal. And, in fact, all these byproducts contribute to a sense of greater self-esteem and contentment.

By seeing personal productivity in the light of increased work/life balance and making it part and parcel of your personal growth and self-fulfillment, you're actually more likely to succeed at attaining it. In giving personal productivity the priority it deserves, you'll have a powerful incentive to overcome your inertia and make initial changes as well as gain some of the motivation needed to keep making necessary adjustments over the long haul.

A master craftsman in any profession is expected to be proficient in the use of the tools of his or her trade. Peak personal productivity for today's knowledge worker demands no less, although the tools of the trade are fast becoming less and less tangible (physical day planners aside).

The very premise of this book is that currently you routinely underutilize Microsoft Outlook by restricting its use primarily to doing your e-mail and, secondarily, perhaps, to maintaining your address book. This limited usage, however, means you're nowhere close to being proficient in using Outlook as it was designed — that is, as a Personal Information Manager (PIM for short) that not only enables you to stay in contact with those you need to stay in contact with, but also enables you to organize and manage your time.

The other assumption of this book is that only when you're able to use Outlook as your complete Personal Information Manager does it become your central personal productivity tool. Mastering all of the Outlook modules and understanding how to adapt their features to your particular needs (which are the stated objectives of this book) should put you well on your way towards attaining a degree of personal productivity that significantly reduces stresses in your life and improves your work/life balance.

The organization of your workspace and work materials isn't the be-all and end-all of personal productivity. Rather, it's the bedrock upon which peak personal productivity sits.

Keeping in mind that being organized often means different things to different people. You still need to be sure that you can put your finger on all the information you need without wasting a bunch of time going through files, folders, and papers. In terms of Outlook, this means being able to quickly find any e-mail messages and address book contacts you may need as well as staying on top of the appointments on your calendar and to-do items on your task list.

I say quite a bit about the importance of prioritizing your daily tasks earlier in this chapter, in the "Establishing your daily priorities" section. The only thing worth reiterating here is that being able to determine the most important task at hand is only the first part of the story when it comes to prioritizing.

You also have to be able to determine whether you have the resources and adequate blocks of open time to get this most important task done properly. If you find you have the resources but not the time, you then have to determine how to break the task down into smaller subtasks that do fit within your open time slots.

Planning sometimes seems like the fool's gold of personal productivity. Although, there's something really satisfying about being able to plan out in detail how to get something done, it's also true that, more often than not, circumstances don't allow you to follow the plan exactly as conceived. For this reason, some knowledge workers become disillusioned with the planning aspect of personal productivity and tend to harbor some rather negative views regarding its overall efficacy.

And while it's true that plans often have to change and projects (especially complex ones) seldom come in exactly on time and right on budget, it's just as true that no significant project, even the late, significantly over-budget ones, ever got off the ground and completed without some kind of planning.

Therefore, my position on planning is to take it seriously, but not too seriously. The idea here is that you shouldn't be overly stressed when your best-laid plans have to change, but you should still have said plans as a solid groundwork from which to make all the necessary adjustments.

The power of positive thinking in determining a good outcome was well documented. I suspect that a large part of burnout, both personal and professional, is due to the inability of a person to focus on what he or she can do about a given situation instead of being fixated on what he or she can't do.

Focusing on what's lacking and not possible is not only generally demoralizing, but it also all too easily leads to a never-ending litany of things that can't be accomplished. It goes without saying that this type of negative thinking is by its very nature stress-inducing. It's probably also true that focusing on what's not happening is the antithesis of productivity and has never made anyone happier with their current situation.

Focusing instead on what it is you can do, even when your options are limited, not only keeps you going, it often leads you down creative paths that you wouldn't have normally traveled.

Sometimes, focusing on options even when the options are quite limited has actually resulted in me coming up with a better, more elegant and efficient solution to a problem at hand (and even greater productivity) than I would have been able to manifest without the limitations. The important point here is that I discovered this more creative solution by keeping a positive attitude focused on what was feasible given the limits of the situation and not by focusing my attention on the limitations themselves.

Staying open to change is very much a part of keeping the mental agility and flexibility that so often separates a truly productive person from one who is merely getting by. This type of dexterity is also an important component of maintaining that positive attitude that helps you to stay focused on what you can influence rather than on what you're powerless to change.

The people who've had the most positive influence on me, both personally and professionally, are all those who are very nimble mentally and maintain very flexible attitudes when it comes to facing the vicissitudes of life. They understand that change, even the disruptive kind, is an inevitable part of life. They also know that getting stressed over a change, even an unwanted one, is the most counterproductive way to approach the situations that inevitably result from change.

Instead of allowing themselves the luxury of wasting precious energy on fighting change (a losing battle at best), highly productive people do everything they can to channel and direct their energy toward finding solutions and dealing with all the matters that change engenders. In this way, they're able to focus on minimizing the stress that change inevitably creates through attitudes and actions focused squarely on solving the problems at hand.

I already touch upon the challenge that information overload poses to the productivity of the average knowledge worker earlier in this chapter, in the "Too much information!" section. The only thing I want to add here about the topic is to keep in mind that avoiding information overload really isn't a matter of steering clear of data (a clear impossibility in the information age in which you work) but one of steering clear of as much extraneous and trivial data as possible (the all the stuff that you don't consider information).

If you can do that, more often than not it won't matter how much data is out there or how much data comes your way. Provided you can locate and make use of just the small portion of data that is of vital interest to you, you should go a long way toward staying productive without stressing out.

The final productivity strategy in my top ten is one that's all too easily overlooked. Therefore, keep in mind that although this particular strategy is last on the list, it's definitely not least.

Articles and books on personal productivity and even the gurus creating them very often concentrate almost exclusively on the personal side of things — what an individual knowledge worker needs to know and do in order to be efficient. This imbalance in the coverage can give you the misimpression that personal productivity's all about you (rather than mostly about you).

A large part of any given workday is bound to be devoted to dealing with people on the larger team somehow (more and more often, electronically). Therefore knowing how to deal with them in a truly effective manner is going to help you become and remain more productive by giving you more time that you can allocate to the other 10,000 things you need to do on your own.

To that end, I include detailed coverage in later chapters on how you can use the Outlook Mail and Contacts components to maintain top-notch communication with people on your larger team (see Chapters 9 and 11). I also cover at some length how to make good use of the Calendar and Tasks modules when you need to shift tasks on your calendar or to-do list over to co-workers on your team (see Chapters 10 and 12). To effectively delegate tasks in this way, you have to maintain clear communication with the people who you now expect will get them done. You also have to know how to track these delegated tasks by obtaining all necessary feedback about their progress after you consider them to be "off your desk" and they no longer appear on your calendar or to-do list.