Take Back Your Life!: Using Microsoft® Outlook® to Get Organized and Stay Organized (Bpg-Other)

As soon as I got the book from our HR department, I thought to myself "when am I going to have time to read this book?", and then I put it away. I was going through a very stressful period at the time, and I had to make a hard stop and get away for a couple days to relax and not think about work.

So I took the book with he, thinking "maybe there is something I can learn"... as soon as I started to read I could not stop, I did not care if I had to work all day and read at night, I took every single free minute I had to read the book. As results, this book has changed my life. I can say "no", I think I am in control of both my personal and business life, and I am very happy with the methodology and how it is working for me.



Thanks to all the team that work on making this book

This book is the bridge between David Allen's Getting Things Done and a practical guide for most people to implement productivity techniques in their daily lives using MS Outlook. The section on Collection Points was revealing and helped to further reduce my collection points. The shift to the Calendar as the primary place where things really get done is a fundamental shift and the first that I have read to reveal this paradigm shift. The proposition that a task has a 75% chance of getting done when it's on the Calendar, speaks for the shift to the Calendar as the place where action in the real world occurs. This book has the right amount of detail, with specific instructions on how to make changes in Outlook. This book is a must-have for those who want to work on meaningful things without caving into the pressures of daily interruptions.

This was exactly what I was looking for. I run 3 businesses and the input of information becomes too much to handle. This is a methodology for task and time management that is designed for people that are over-saturated and spend a lot of time working with Microsoft Outlook.

Excellent, they should teach this in Universitites.

Loved this book and refer lots of my colleagues to it. McGhee identifies about a dozen key "a-ha" breakthroughs in her work helping others manage their workloads. Then she organizes the book to make them clear, effective, and mutually reinforcing (e.g. after your goal setting, set up your files, your email folders, your work folders, etc. etc. along those lines. It's incredible how such reinforcement helps get you to integrate it into your life).

I found this book to be a great read filled with great ideas and concepts, especially if you want to utilize Outlook and Pocket Outlook together to get organized and get ahead.

I do agree it covers many (most, if not all, actually) of David Allen's book but I liked it specifically for it's focus on using Outlook to implement the very similar ideas which David doesn't do.

Another reviewer found it verbose but I didn't think it detracted from the information presented which was done in a very conversational manner. McGhee presents the information very well.

I would hope no one would be scared away from purchasing this book and incorporating its concepts because of the time involved as stated by another reviewer. You obviously don't have to do everything in one fell swoop (unless of course you have the time) but implementing the concepts one chunk at a time will get you well on your way to a more useful implementation of Outlook and on the road to taking back your life. This way you keep your eye on the big concept (which is a Meaningful Objectives) of what you are doing (Supporting Project) and why as opposed to the how (which is a Strategic Next Action).

I started in with simply learning to better utilize my Calendar (I've got more time on my hands than I thought) then moved to better use of Tasks (getter more accomplished with less stress), then onto my e-mail Inbox (no more messages lying around) and am now working on setting up folders (finally, a place for everything AND I CAN NOW FIND IT EASILY:) as suggested. Not all at once but it has allowed me to handle new stuff 100 times better as I continue getting to the details of the system. Imagine my surprise at finding out how much I could do right from Outlook simply by implementing her concepts!

Buy the book, you won't regret it. BTW I got mine used from one of the Amazon sellers ;) but it's worth every penny if you are serious about bringing real order and productivity to you business and personal life.