Does this cheeseball (Butterball?) ad get your attention?

(click for larger image)

We sure hope so. After all, eProductivity Premier and Professional licenses are 50% off this week! Gobble this offer up because it ends in a few days and there won't be any leftovers.

So don't wait. Grab your friend's wallet and buy yourself a new productivity tool. The ultimate Lotus Notes productivity tool, in fact. Doesn't an empty inbox sound nice heading into the holiday season?

If you already own eProductivity, buy it for the friend whose wallet you pinched. That's called generosity! They should benefit from eProductivity too.

If they keep their wallet well-protected, at least be kind and tell them about the offer.

Go here to learn more about this offer.

(Bad puns courtesy of myself and another staffer who shall not be named...)

Taped in David Allen's office, this is an intriguing look at how David sets up his personal GTD system. The video is fairly old - created in January 2009 - so you may have seen it before. I, however, just ran across it for the first time while perusing the web and decided to share it with you all. :)

No mention of eProductivity, which he uses as his GTD software tool of choice, but that's understandable. He didn't focus on software in this particular video.

I like how he consistently advocates using a physical inbox. Letting me know I needed an inbox was the first big way that GTD has personally helped me.

Paul updated his Reference Tutorial video with this additional clip. It shows how to use the Reference Database's Quick Paste feature. Very handy when you're dealing with repetitious information!

We've been offering free public webinars for a few weeks now. They've definitely been a success and we've received great feedback from attendees. Thanks everyone! However, if you didn't live in the Americas, our session times may have been a little inconvenient.

That is no longer the case. We're now offering webinars at more international-friendly times.

Anyone located overseas should appreciate the changes. Although we think an Australian getting up for a 3:00am Saturday morning webinar shows great dedication - and we really appreciate it! - we want to help you get your beauty sleep too.

See our eProductivity Webinars page for more details on the new times.

You should attend an eProductivity webinar if:
• You're curious how eProductivity might benefit you
• You want a live demonstration of eProductivity's features
• You want tips and best practices for using eProductivity
• You want to learn the foundational ideas of GTD

Come by and join us!

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.

 

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.

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

Follow the screen shots below to learn how to create a linked Waiting For action item after sending off an email.

(Click the images for a larger view)

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.

During last week's eProductivity Basics webinar, a common question was, "Can you create more videos/guides for setting up and using eProductivity?"

While we do have a number of resources available, creating more is a big priority for us, and we're working on it. In the meantime, we have some unofficial resources to draw your attention to.

Recently, Paul Gardner showed how he setup the eProductivity sidebar widgets in Notes 8. And today, Eric Mack shares another setup tip with you.

Eric demonstrates how he sets up the link between his eProductivity Reference Database and his eProductivity Mail. When the link is setup, you can do neat things like drag-and-drop reference items from your email directly into the Reference Database for organized storage. Very handy.

Launch Video

(Tip: watch the video in full-screen mode for the best viewing experience...)

Learn more about setting up eProductivity sidebar widgets by viewing Paul Gardner's excellent tutorial video above. Paul is an eProductivity customer and a prolific blogger. This video shows how Paul setup the widgets for himself. Remember that these widgets require Lotus Notes 8 to run.

And, if you want to know more about pastors and ministry workers using GTD, Paul writes a great blog on that subject.

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