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02.08.07

GTD@Outlook with Jello.Dashboard

I’ve been looking for an efficient way of organizing tasks, contacts and mails in Microsoft Outlook for some time. After using Jello.Dashboard for more than 3 months, I think I’ve found what I was looking for.

Jello.Dashboard is a Homepage for Outlook that adds GTD like functionality at no cost. Go and have a look for yourself.

The only thing I missed from Jello.Dashboard was a keyboard shortcut for activating the Outlook Homepage (the Dashboard). After searching the Internet (Outlook Help didn’t help at all) I came upon KC Lemson’s blog and her post “Outlook 2003 tip o’ the day”. She explains how to customize the Outlook toolbar, add a clickable action, and assign a keyboard shortcut.

So I added the “Outlook Today” action from the “Advanced” group, changed the icon to “Text only (always)” (context menu), and finally assigned a shortcut by renaming the icon/action in the context menu. I ‘ve chosen Alt-q. Why? I renamed the action to “inno&q Today”. The “&” does the work of assigning an Alt-Key-Combination to a character with the action’s name. The choice of “q” is obvious for two reasons: a) “innoQ” and b) Alt-q is easily accessible. 

Posted by Hartmut Wilms at 02.08.07 16:43