As a consulting professional, I have tracked the way I use my time for years.
One of the greatest innovations I have come across in the past year is a program called SnapLogger, which takes screen-shots every few minutes as long as the user is active in Windows. It is an excellent program.
Now, if only Outlook would cooperate and allow a user to record the actual history of an appointment or task. For example, it could tell you without great programming effort when an appointment was created, when it was first scheduled, when it was completed, or when it was rescheduled. Of all these items, the most important is “when it was completed”.
If an appointment were tracked, it would provide a user the opportunity to go back to a particular day to find out what items were completed on that day, allowing for skillful tracking of completed appointments.
However, at the moment in Outlook the user only has a choice of manipulating a reminder in the following ways: it can either be punted for later use (by putting it on Snooze) or it can be dismissed at which point it never returns to the list of reminders.
How about another button: “Completed”
A user would record the appointment (or task) as done, and the system would record it to a list of completed items for that day. A professional such as I would then have the option of going back to the day to see what time-demands were successfully completed.
Now THAT would be useful.
P.S. Does anyone know how to contact the designers of Outlook? I have tried but have never been successful in finding a link of any kind.
The 2Time Mgt Blog 
December 12, 2007 at 9:35 am |
If I understand your question correctly it is possible.
1. create a new view in tasks.
2. filter the view by status=completed.
3. Set the sort to date completed.
4. You can further go to the advanced tab and select “date completed” and last month to see only those recently completed.
Let me know if this works for you.
December 12, 2007 at 1:22 pm |
I found the following contact form on the Microsoft website – whether they’ll get back to you is another matter entirely!
http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/suggestions.aspx?sitename=CL100626971033&type=0
December 12, 2007 at 4:40 pm |
Summy,
The challenge here is that I am trying to track completed Appointments, not Tasks.
Any ideas?
December 12, 2007 at 6:26 pm |
I didn’t realize you meant appointments but it should work anyway- the field name seems to be “end”.
Unless you’re wondering about the time you compled the apt- that’s not tracked. But why do you dismiss an apt on a different time then when it’s actually scheduled- then it’s not really scheduled.
Then my question is why wouldn’t you use tasks instead of appointments? If you want to schedule a specific task you can.