My Journey…

Pardon my grammar(was never my strong point) with regards to the title of this post. All i was trying to do, was to make a feeble attempt at mimicking the quote  “Plan the work. Work the plan”.

I had always used the outlook calendar regularly for planning meeting at my previous job, but now that I was back to school for my MBA, I has discontinued this practice. This was mainly due to the acrimonious relationship between the outlook calender and vCalendar(used by my college to send event dates) and also due to the fact that most of the meeting requests now came through ’simple emails’ and not as ‘meeting requests’. This made recording the time of meeting in outlook calendar a troublesome task. Sometime early this year in late January, i made conflicting meeting commitments and then did not even go to a single one as it just slipped my mind in absence of reminder in outlook. This was the trigger for change.

I upgraded my outlook from 2003 to 2007 and this solved the problem that i was having with vCalendar and I also started taking the pains of entering the meeting timings and agenda from ’simple emails’ into my outlook calendar(essentially having the same effect as accepting a ‘meeting request’). In outlook 2007, you have the facility to have various categories and each of these categories has a different color. You can assign categories to emails, meetings and practically every possible item in outlook. This way i was able to get my meetings streamlined and events prioritized and segmented. Next, I extended this procedure to include other time sensitive recurring events like paying rent, electric bill, gas bill, telephone bill and Internet bill. Then, at the very start of the winter quarter in January, I chalked out the entire quarters’ timetable, with exam dates, assignment due dates, lecture dates and times. I also included reminder of 2 days for midterms, 4 days for finals and case reports. Though it looks very time consuming to put all this stuff in the outlook calendar, it really is not. Using ‘recurring event’ feature in outlook you can easily key in the class time table for the entire quarter or semester.

Having seen the results of this in terms of forward and current visibility of my own schedule which allowed me to better plan my activities better, I started scheduling everything thing in my outlook calendar. From studying for financial management to buying groceries and from following up with a contact i made in a consulting firm to doing my laundry. I am now hopelessly dependent on outlook, but it has significantly improved my life. I had always planned my life, but this level of scheduling just made living the plan easier. Being inherently lazy, easy in my mind is always better.

P.S. This post sounds like an advertisement for Microsoft… but it is not…