your day is My Day

When we were defining our goals for Office 2008, one of them was to help you manage your time. Out of that came the idea for My Day.

One of my problems with managing my time is my email. I get something on the order of eleventy billion emails every day, and they come in at a steady trickle. One of my personal failings is that, when I see that I have new email, I am compelled to see what it is. It's an almost Pavlovian response: see icon, click to email, get rewarded with the treat of new email (which, of course, is not always a treat). Sometimes I just want to look at Entourage to see what meeting is next or what my to-do list looks like, but there's that pretty shiny new-mail indicator beckoning to me.

It turns out that I'm not the only person who has that problem. (Which is quite a relief!) You want to see what you should be working on right now, but the lure of email calls, and suddenly you realise that a half hour has passed and you haven’t been working on what you really should be working on. Solving that problem is one of the goals of My Day. My Day isn't intended to show you anything at all about your email. Instead, it's a quick heads-up display to show you what your calendar and your tasks list.

When I first started using the daily builds of Office 2008 more than a year ago, My Day wasn't one of the reasons that I was looking forward to trying out the latest and greatest. (The feature that I wanted the most was SmartArt in PowerPoint.) At first, I never really got into My Day. That changed over time. I've been using My Day extensively for the past few months, and it's really made a difference in how I manage my time.

I've always been a heavy calendar user, but now My Day means that I don't tend to look at my calendar for today's events. I look at My Day to see when my next meeting is and where I'm supposed to be for it. I look at my calendar for future events and to schedule new meetings. And I'm actually using the task list now. I've always had the best of intentions when it comes to keeping a task list, but I would try it for a few weeks and then never look at it again. With My Day always visible, I'm finding myself using it to enter new tasks and to check off ones that I've currently got. A year ago, you would've seen about four tasks on my list, all of which were overdue. I've currently got 17 of them right now (although four of them are overdue — but at least they're not the same four that were overdue a year ago!). The biggest change, though, is that I now can let that new mail icon in Entourage wait for ... well, at least 10 minutes before I click on it to see what new email has arrived. This is an improvement of at least 9.8 minutes. Maybe I can get up to 15 minutes one day! All of this means that I’m better focused on my work and better able to get things done.

Coming later: how My Day evolved as a result of user feedback (including the answer to the question "why isn't My Day a widget?").

Comments

• Anonymous
  December 15, 2008
  A question came up on the You Talk list recently about Tasks. The following was posted by Nadyne Mielke, a user experience researcher for Microsoft. My Day displays your Entourage tasks and calendar events. The default view gives you three calendar events