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Jens Bruntt is an eProductivity guest blogger. He blogs regularly over at the eponymous Jens Bruntts blog

This week I started working after four great weeks of holidays in Provence, France. I had a lot of open projects and email threads when I left, so coming back is always interesting. It has been truly marvelous how easy it was to get back on track, and a lot of the credit goes to eProductivity - the Getting Things Done add-on for Lotus Notes.

When I came back from my long holiday I needed to do almost no work to get the overview of what was in progress and what needed to be followed up on. Because when I left everything had already been organized into Projects and Actions and especially the "Waiting for" Actions. The Actions that I knew I needed to do when I came back had already been linked to Calendar entries.

An example:
When I came back I had an email in my inbox. It was from the helpdesk at a company that is developing a set of web services that we are integrating with. This is work in progress in both their and our end. The email asked me to please let them know if we had any still open issues with them; they were afraid that they had missed something because they are in the early stages of establishing their production environment and the helpdesk is also new.

It was so easy to answer that. I went to my "Waiting for" folder in my eP-enabled mail and looked for any lines that had to do with that project. There were no open issues. Had there been any they would have been there as I always create "Waiting for" Actions when I open issues with external helpdesks. 

Easy.

The other day we got an email from Mathias, a long-time eProductivity user. His email reads like one of those Mastercard commercials.

He wrote:

I can't resist to share some numbers with you...

• 4 Weeks of Vacation
• 932 new eMails afterwards
• 2.5 Days to "Organize"
• 86 actions defined
• 0 eMails in Inbox left

Thanks to eProductivity. ;-)

Thanks, Mathias! It's always great to hear how eProductivity benefiting our users.

For our readers: if you've got an eProductivity story to tell, let us know by using the Send Feedback feature inside eProductivity.

Other customer stories:
Videos
Written

Editor note: This is a guest post from Amanda Bauman that was originally posted on the Lotus Technical Information and Education Community Blog. She regularly blogs there. Amanda first learned about eProductivity and GTD from the "Getting Things Done with Lotus Notes" webinar in April 2010. She is now a passionate fan and is working on sharing her story with others.

As you may know by now from my previous blog posts, I've been trying out David Allen's GTD methodology, and have also taken a keen interest in eProductivity, created by Eric Mack.

Lucky girl that I am, I got to take a much needed vacation with my family in Mexico for almost 2 weeks. In the past when I took any sizable chunks of time off, It was always with the dread knowledge that I would come back to hundreds of emails to wade through, many of which require me to do something, and many of which would fall through the cracks until somebody reminded me that I missed something. Not what you want to face when you're coming down from a sun-soaked, fun filled, stress-free couple of weeks with the family, right?

So it was with a little bit of pessimism that I started my day on Tuesday  -- my first day back at work.  I felt myself kind of wince a little bit as I launched Lotus Notes and synchronized my local replica mailbox. I had visions of a slot machine in Vegas with prize going up up up, finally stopping at the number displayed in my inbox, but without the euphoria. Let's just say that had my number of  unread emails equaled a Vegas jackpot, I might consider taking another (shorter) vacation ;).

Continue Reading "No Post-Vacation Email Woes" »

IBMer Amanda Bauman recently reduced her inbox from 5000 emails to zero after learning GTD techniques. She attended the April 8 "Getting Things Done with Lotus Notes" web event and learned the best practices of GTD straight from the experts, David Allen and Eric Mack. Inspired by what she learned, Amanda made some dramatic improvements to her productivity system. I had linked to her story previously.

Today - a little over 1 month later - Amanda posted an update. She writes:

It's been over a month since I started my quest to clean out my in-box and adopt the GTD methodology. I've purposefully restricted this quest to just my work life, because quite frankly, my personal life works  just fine as is :-), and I'm a big fan of only tackling one major change at a time, otherwise I start to feel out of control. And be assured, GTD is a big change.

But over a month later, my in box remains empty, my to do list remains full, and things that may have been on the edge of my radar and in danger of falling off... well, they are still on the edge, but now there is a nice, tidy wall around everything to prevent things from slipping off the edge.

She goes on to describe some of the challenges and successes she's experienced on her journey with GTD & eProductivity. Read the full post

Her story is well-worth the few minutes it takes to read. It echoes some of the other stories that we've heard from eProductivity users. Implementing a new productivity system can be a challenge - we all know how hard it is to change habits! But when you have great tools that attract you to use them, frequently the pain of change can be tempered and the adoption of new habits can be accelerated.

What are challenges you've faced on your way to working smarter, not harder?

Vaughan Rivette is a passionate GTD and eProductivity user and he recently shared this video in which he talks about the benefits he's experienced since implementing GTD with eProductivity.

"This is a video I put together which gives me the chance to explain the value I have found in using David Allen’s methodology called GTD (Getting things done). To use this methodology and to gain the stress free results, you don’t have to use Lotus Notes, or anything electronic for that matter. However, I find that Lotus Notes combined with eProductivity works really well for me. Anyway, this video is a bit of a ramble and some of the sound quality is not the best, but it may give you some insight into what I have been doing."

Source: Vaughan Rivett

Following up his video about improving the Lotus Foundations customer experience, Dave Lawrence also had this to say about bringing out the best in Foundations.

[YouTube Link]

Many of our customers are pioneers of sorts. Maybe you're one of them. Let me explain why our free license & full refunds promotion is for you.

You, our pioneering customers, tell us about the value that eProductivity brings to your everyday work. Quite often, you've purchased eProductivity with your own money with no reimbursement from your company. You do it because it helps you to perform your job better.

That's a glowing recommendation in my book.

One of my roles here at eProductivity is spreading the word about our software, so I love hearing your stories. It's great to see that eProductivity really works for people.

The exciting thing is that word IS spreading. People are telling their coworkers and friends about the benefits that only eProductivity can provide through GTD-enabling Lotus Notes. More and more companies are looking to adopt us.

You can help to speed things along. We're offering to give your company lots of free licenses. You just need to tell them about it.

And since you, our pioneers and early adopters, have paved the way at your company, we want to refund your original eProductivity purchase. It's our way of saying thanks and putting a little extra cash in your pocket for the holidays.

Your stories and efforts are appreciated!

You can learn more about the opportunity here.

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!

(Remember to click the small images to get a larger view)

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.

 

We enjoy reading the blogs of enthusiastic eProductivity users. Here are some eProductivity blog posts. If you know of a blog that is not included this list, please let us know and we will add it.

Update: Page has been moved here.