Inside eProductivity Blog Home Page

If you're new to eProductivity, the eProductivity tutorial is the single best learning tool that we offer.

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The tutorial lets you play with eProductivity's features, and gives you guidance and tips along the way. There is nothing to install, you just open up the tutorial file and away you go. It's that simple.

If you want to get started quickly with eProductivity, I recommed using the tutorial as your first step.

Get the eProductivity tutorial

Need some guidance on using eProductivity more effectively?

I recommend subscribing to the eProductivity Weekly Tips newsletter. This free email newsletter offers easily digestible tips & tricks on using the various eProductivity features. It's a pretty convenient way to learn more about the software.

Go here for an sample newsletter from the past month.

Go here to subscribe.

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Bruce Lill is a Lotus Design Partner and now recently, an eProductivity user. Bruce blogs at www.brucelill.com. He has given us permission to repost some of his thoughts on eProductivity that were initially posted on his blog. Enjoy!

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eProductivity in Use - my setup:

The mail opens to the Today view shown below. The navigation lets you view all your projects, action, list and reference databases from one place. You can now really live in your mail file. The folders are from the choices you make on the eProductivity preferences. For me the projects are for internal use, clients or Lotus ( the redbook, etc). I spend most time with this navigator open as I can do almost all functionality. I use IBM's Swift file so I can put emails into folders easily. The only thing I miss is to have the "replicate now" button on the navigator. I added it to my old mail template and will probably add it here also. It is on the action bar but you have to scroll to get to it. As I work local all the time, I tend to like to refresh my mail.

My mail file's navigation after installing eProductivity.

Here is the Today view with my actions and any meetings listed. Luckily today there aren't any meetings today, so I'm doing this blog entry.

Here is what a project looks like. This one is important, it's to become more productive!

I have only 3 - project types. Projects is for internal work such as this blog, Projects - Clients is for billable projects and Projects - Lotus is for projects that I do with Lotus such as the Domino R8.5 Deployment wiki.  I'll end up with more projects types as I get a better feel for how to manage my tasks. You can take emails and link, embed into tasks & projects or move then to the reference database.

I've always used database to store information, I have a customer, development, administration, and office dbs. I use the customer db to track projects, proposals, general  information and correspondence. I've added code to my mail template to let me drag selected mails to a modified document library and all the email information would be stored there. This let me centralize the information and when working with others, share it.

Now it's gong to be trying to use the eProductivity Reference database instead of mine. I have moved all the emails with license and registration numbers to the reference database.

I do wish the Action list in the project form could be longer, as you can see from the image of the form, only 3-4 items are visible. you can scroll or go to a view to see more. I'm now adding a action to my project to build a list of "Nice to have" features that I will post here.

One caveat I found was creating an Action and forgetting to link it to a project. When you change folders or open your mail you will be prompted to make it a project. I hit yes and ended up with the task as a project, not what I wanted. You can't demote it, only delete it and re-do it.  I'll know next time. I do wish it let me have a choice to make it a project of link it to a project.

I have found this error was do to having a context call "S/M - Projects", it seems that the Projects in the name was the cause of the problem, Easy fix. The title or subject of the Projects and actions can be formatted to appear categorized in views. I just figured this out this morning as I was updating my projects. You can group projects together  by first selecting the format in your preference then for the Project title do "category - project name".  In the view the project will be group by the category. here is my Lotus Projects (Project - Lotus is a project type):

Do plan for time to setup, get use to it and to adjust it to fit. You can easily change your preferences such as add project type and the left side navigation will be updated with your new choices. Really nice job.

Next post will be on using it for the deployment redbook. Go and give eProductivity a chance to change how you approach your mail.

 

A customer recently asked:

How can I create a linked Waiting For action item after sending an email? I'm about to send off an email to a colleague that requires them to respond and I don't want to forget.

Geat question. The answer is, eProductivity has many powerful linking options.

Go through the screenshots below to learn how to create a linked Waiting For action item after sending off an email.

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Step 1:

Step 2:

Step 2.5:

Send the email. :)

Step 3:

Step 4:

There you go! Hope it helps to save you time and eliminates the unproductive extra clicks required to manually link the email to a new Waiting For.

Sidebar: As I've been mentioning, we're creating more training resources for our customers, including our free public webinars that are now available. If you have webinar topics that you want covered, or if you have a time slot (e.g. Tuesdays at 1:00pm) that you would really like to see webinars held at, please let us know. We value your feedback and suggestions.

Do you want to end the work day with your inbox at zero? Do you want to feel a greater degree of clarity about where you need to spend your time? Do you want a better sense of which projects are the most effective for you to work on at any given moment? You need to attend an eProductivity webinar.

We're developing a series of free, publically-available webinars designed to give you a jumpstart on eProductivity. Ample time for Q&A will be included, so you'll have an opportunity to ask your burning questions. Check back here on the blog as we release more details and give you a special opportunity to sign up for the limited amount of spaces.

In the meantime, I have a question for you: Are there any topics that you really want to to learn about? Any particular features you want a better handle on, such as the power of the Reference Journal or using Categorized Views to group related projects together?

Either Contact Us or leave a comment on this post. We want to target our webinars at whatever needs you have, so this is your chance to help us give you the best value. We appreciate it!