HACKER Q&A
📣 johng

Best time and task organizational tool?


Recently my SO has been complaining about the number of emails she has to send out, keep track of, and the boilerplate that is usually needed. She also has to track time like a lawyer. The company uses outlook for email and I don’t know what for time tracking. I’m wondering what software I can suggest that would make her life easier and more efficient. I hate to see her get bogged down with inefficient software. Any suggestions welcomed.


  👤 al_borland Accepted Answer ✓
Depending on where she works, she may not have an option to use the various suggestions you might get. There are entire suites designed around sending out information to leads, tracking follow ups, etc.

Outlook itself has a lot of tools in it, but the problem is you basically need to understand all the various tools, then cobble together your own system using them, and actually get in the habits of doing the things within your system.

Rules can be a big help with dealing with income mail, to either sort it into folders, tag it, or various other things. Some people make really complex systems that somehow work for them, but I've never been able to get something like that to stick. I just have a bunch of rules that send stuff to the trash or tag things, then have a few smart folders, which is basically just a saved search.

For sending, there are some features for inserting various blocks of text. Email templates can also be saved for boilerplate stuff. Make the template, save it, then when it's needed you can just open the template throw and address in and send it.

There are also text expander apps (not part of Outlook). The boilerplate stuff can be put in there and she can just hit a hotkey or type a couple letters and it will dump in the rest. Espanso is one I've been playing around with recently. I used AutoHotKey for years when I was on Windows, which can do all kinds of stuff to automate your desktop to make annoying repetitive work easier, but it has a decently high learning curve.

For a few things at work I made a little site with PHP to basically make a MadLib where a person fills out a little form and then it blasts out an email with the words filled in. There are probably tools for stuff like this, but it was easy enough to make myself and then I didn't have to worry about getting it approved.

There are a ton of time tracking software packages out there, but it is very likely that whatever she uses it linked to a billing system for the company, so it isn't something that can just be substituted. Most of these things have some desktop apps, browser extensions... something... to try and make it a little easier (but most of them still suck).