Please email any tips or tricks to Rich@PocketPCmag.com.
With a busy schedule and a long list of Tasks, it's easy to find yourself running in circles—going back to a store to buy forgotten items, or calling someone two or three times when once was all you needed. Grouping your Tasks by activity can solve this problem.When you create a new Task or edit an old one, you have the opportunity to enter a category for it. Tap on the field labeled "Categories" and you are presented with a list of categories that can help you organize your Tasks list. You can tap on the Add/Delete folder tab to create a new category.
You can create categories for the type of activity you are going to do. For example, my Tasks tend to be of certain distinct types: CALLS I need to make, things I want to READ, items I want to BUY, places I need to GO, etc. When it was time to go to the store, I used to waste a lot of time scrolling through my Tasks list to find all the things I wanted to buy. Then I started entering BUY in the Categories field of any Task associated with an item I needed to purchase. Now, when it's time to go shopping, I open Tasks, tap on the Tasks pull-down menu at the top of the screen, and select BUY. Only the items I have to buy are displayed in my Tasks list (Screen 1). Note the last Task item shown in the screenshot. "Travel items (see notes)." I have a list of items I need to buy every time I go on a trip. Instead of making seven or eight Tasks items, I make one and put the individual items in the Notes field of that item.
Screen 1: The Categories feature in Tasks lets you organize and display Tasks related to a certain activity.
Do you want to be accessible to others, yet still get everything on your Tasks lists done? One thing that can help you with this is to decide beforehand how much time you need to spend with them and then create a Calendar appointment to remind you a minute or two before the time you've allotted for the meeting is up. This technique can be used for any individual or group meeting. If you have a long meeting with multiple presentations, a Q&A session, etc., you can create appointment alarms to remind you of when each section should end. Finally, if there's something you need to do or a question you need to ask before the meeting is over, you can put a reference to that in the reminder appointment (Screen 2).
Screen 2: Set Calendar reminders to keep meetings on time.
"Boilerplating" is an efficiency lover's dream and a must if you have to enter the same blocks of text into your Pocket PC over and over again.
For example, let's say you are a sales person who needs to correspond with clients while you travel. In your e-mails you find yourself giving the same answer about a product or service to many different clients. If you're smart, you save the answer as "boilerplate" and paste it into each new e-mail or document, rather than rewrite it each time.
Create a single Word document titled "Answers" and fill it with your most-repeated responses. Keep the document open in Pocket Word while you answer your e-mail. If you need some boilerplate, cut and paste it from your Word document to the e-mail reply. Keep separate documents for longer topics. Open them as needed and cut and paste information into your e-mail, or simply attach the document file to your e-mail reply (Screen 3).
Screen 3: You can keep frequently cited information in Word documents and cut and paste the information into an e-mail message, or just attach the Word file itself.
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