The power of Task Management.

I recently switched back to using outlook for work related email and more recently an overall time and contact management solution. Outlook 2007 really is a great application, everything is easy to find and use and unlike the other Office 2007 applications it’s easy to cut out any un-wanted fluff in the program’s interface. The only detail that has been keeping me from using Outlook for task management before is that I just bought a Palm Tungsten T2 and I needed to figure out a way to get it syncing with Outlook rather they the poorly designed Palm Desktop software. (No offense Palm, but it really does suck. I mean, you can’t even search…WTF)

This week I made it a little project to get the Palm syncing by both the USB cradle and Bluetooth to my notebook where I’m using Outlook for work. I actually got it going fairly easy using the Palm Outlook Conduits which they mention comes with some Palm PDAs. What they don’t mention is that the Conduits also come with the latest version of the Palm Desktop software which is available for download. Free.

I did however run into a small problem due to the fact that I’m running Windows Vista with Outlook 2007. Luckily Palm has released an update to address the Conduit’s incompatibility with Office 2007, the only issue was that the update could only be applied if the Conduits are installed, and the Conduits didn’t want to install because I wasn’t running a compatible version of Office. A quick Google search found me a workaround to this quandary.

Task Management has become ever-more important to me. I’m constantly feeling like I simply don’t have time to do all the things I’d like. I figure that if I can optimize the use of my time and squeeze every ounce of productivity out of the time I have that I may end up with the extra time I need. Another ‘Life’ project I want to start is better money management. I’m making more money now, and I’m starting to not think about the amount of money I’m spending on everything. ‘Willy Nilly’ as my mother says, I have a budget in place but I’m not following it as closely as I should. Lack of money isn’t the issue, I used to budget due to lack of funds, if I didn’t properly budget everything I would be broke, now I want to budget to control my spending, so extra funds could go into something more productive such as savings towards something I really want or need.

I think the first step to stricter budgeting habits would be to start keeping track of what I’m spending. As in balance some sort of ledger or record and just keep track of everything. I need to get a system in place soon, my overall bills and expenses will be going up and if I start spending money the way I am now, it could cause problems.

I’ve been looking into a project started by Darek Punsalan of 5ThirtyOne called ‘Mint’, which is an online financial management tool. The Blog goes into the various features and goals behind the project. It looks like it could be a great way to manage funds and spending habits in real-time, online.

Anyway, we will see what happens. I’ll save that for another time.