GTD in Outlook – Jello Dashboard revisited

I told you about Jello Dashboard, a nifty tools that plugs into Outlook as an alternative “home screen”, a while ago. Last week, the developer Dr. Uqbar released the new version 4.5 of Jello Dashboard. It is still beta software, and still free.

Pain free GTD implementation in Outlook
While there are ways to model tasks and task views in Outlook so that it gets many GTDish features, it always involves some compromises. For example, I got the context view down, I can see items for review, “+ waiting for” and “+ someday maybe” items get out of my way, and I can sort by context – but still, there is no good way to group contexts by project, which for me is an important feature, and no good way to assign Next Actions, which is a crucial part of GTD.

Jello Dashboard takes the weight off your shoulders. It knows your calendar items. It knows your tasks, and your inbox. After installing it, you can dig right in, create the categories and projects you need, and then work right out of it.

The important thing is: Jello does not tinker with your Outlook. It is basically a (very sophisticated) HTML/JavaScript page that plugs into Outlook. All functionality of Outlook remains the same, your tasks stay where they are, so do your mail and your calendar.

Speaking of my experience, running Jello on Outlook 2007 and Vista, Jello installs easily and can be removed just as quick. Plus, the small community (see the Google Group) is active and the developer is very responsive (he just recently added a feature that allows me to use the “+” in category names after asking for it in the forum), so when you got issues there is support. It is free. It gives you projects, Next Actions and context views just like you wish you had them. Enough reasons to give it a spin, if you ask me. I am doing the same on this side of the internet. I like it so far – maybe struggling with manual implementation in Outlook for a few months made me more accessible for the idea that this could work for me. The killer feature is Outlook integration, for sure, and for this I am ready to forgive minor performance issues (it could be snappier) and wait for a few little kinks to be worked out.

Don’t forget the basics
Remember: Jello Dashboard is a nice tool – but you can only use it to full effect when you are familiar with the basics of GTD methodology.

Have you tried it? Share your experiences in the comments!