On this cast, we invited a special guest—our colleague and friend—Jim McCullen, to talk about his email-focused personal productivity system for Microsoft Outlook (and eponymous book), Control Your Day. 

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In this Cast | Control Your Day Email Productivity System

Ray Sidney-Smith

Augusto Pinaud

Jim McCullen

Jim McCullen considers himself a productivity hacker, always looking for ways to reduce the effort it takes to stay organized and get more things done. Jim is an avid GTDer and has built a system called Control Your Day that allows Microsoft Outlook users to apply GTD practices to manage their email, task lists and delegated work all from one virtual search folder in Outlook.

Jim published his book, Control Your Day, on Amazon which has sold copies across the world and recently published a Udemy video training series titled Control Your Day.

Show Notes | Control Your Day Email Productivity System

Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.

Control Your Day (website)

Control Your Day (book)

Corporate Email Mastery (course)

Raw Text Transcript | Control Your Day With Jim McCullen

Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).

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Voiceover Artist 0:00 Are you ready to manage your work and personal world better to live a fulfilling productive life, then you've come to the right place productivity cast, the weekly show about all things productivity. Here, your host Ray Sidney-Smith and Augusto Pinaud with Francis Wade and Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:17

And Welcome back, everybody to productivity cast, the weekly show about all things personal productivity, I'm Ray Sidney Smith.

Augusto Pinaud 0:24 I am Augusto Pinaud.

Francis Wade 0:26I'm Francis Wade.

Art Gelwicks 0:27 And I'm Art Gelwicks.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:25And welcome to our listeners to this episode of productivity cast, where we actually are doing something a little bit different than we normally do. We have a guest today to talk about a system that I've known actually for quite a bit of time now. And and so what I wanted to do was for all of us to have a conversation around learning about a system based in Outlook called control your day. And so to do that, we have the progenitor of that system, Jim McCullen, Jim considers himself a productivity hacker always looking for ways to reduce the effort. It takes takes to stay organized and get more things done. Jim's an avid GTD er, and has built a system called control your day that allows Microsoft Outlook users to apply GTD practices to manage email task lists, delegated work, all from one virtual search folder in Outlook. So Jim published his book, control your day on Amazon. And it's sold copies across the world. And he recently published a course based on that series titled control your day. And so welcome to productivity cast,Jim.

Jim McCullen 1:31Hey, Ray, thanks so much for having me today. I am excited and look forward to be able to share some of this information with your audience.

Augusto Pinaud 1:38Oh, really, really excited to have you here. I think I met Jim at least virtually many, many years ago in a time where I was leaving on a closed outlook environment. But over the years, I have recommend Jim's book to many people who are on those kinds of environments who can't or can't install limited pieces of software. Leaving outlook and require really to unleash the power of Outlook. You know, I been saying for many years now the problem with outlook is that is a really, really long rope. And if you don't have a good guide, what happened is you tend to hang yourself with it. And Jim provide one of those good guides. Sowelcome, Jim.

Jim McCullen 2:21Thanks. So, yeah, let me just give you a little bit of an overview of control your day how I got started with it. So everything really started from David Allen's book, Getting Things Done. I was a passionate follower from shortly after it was published. I created all of the manual systems that he originally recommended the paper based systems. And then I started looking for technology solutions to deploy GTD with and at that time, there really weren't very many. And so I as I switched and started using Microsoft Outlook. I tried using these other to do lists and external lists to to match My GTD world and it just wasn't working for me because everything would always come back to Outlook for me. My company is heavily focused on email. We're a global organization, we have people working 24 seven email is just that best channel. And so I needed a way and outlook to apply these GTD practices. And so I started to build out this system control your day, and used it for a number of years before publishing a book or most recently, the training series on it. But the concepts that I deployed were, were really kind of taking a different approach to Outlook. So most of you if you're use Outlook, you probably have dozens or hundreds of folders that you organize your emails into. In control your day. I just use two folders. I have my inbox and my Sent Items. That's it. Everything else is managed in virtual search folders, which are basically just filters that you save in Outlook, and so bye bye Using these virtual search folders, I can organize everything from just my inbox in my Sent Items. The other key thing in control your day is, in most outlook users, you're managing by the received date in your email. So as messages come in that received date, they just keep pushing down other messages and you lose focus on them. What I do as messages come into my control your day system and outlook, I flag every single message with a due date of today. And then I can create a virtual search folder looking for that due date, and organized by that due date. And so that way as I'm processing my email, if new messages come in, and I don't need to deal with them for a couple of weeks, I can just push the due date forward two weeks. Same thing if I send a message to somebody, I can set a follow up flag with a due date on it for say two weeks from now and even put a note in there for what I'm waiting for. And so that that follow up flag in Microsoft Outlook. allows you to add a note. And so that note allows me to define next actions. So David Allen talks a lot about next actions and contexts. And I'm able to incorporate all of that in with the follow up flag notes, and then create these virtual search folders. And let me just come back for one second to the virtual search folders. So I really just have three, I have my due today. So that's everything in my system that's due today, whether it's in my inbox, or my Sent Items, I have my CYD folder, which is everything that's in my system. So anything that has a due date, and the way I clear that out is if I don't need the message, I just clear out the due date flag I've cleared mark the messages as completed. And it's out of my system. It's out of my folders, but it's still in my inbox in my Sent Items for reference. So the other item, the other one I have is my overdue folder. And so that's anything that I haven't gotten to and that ties in perfectly with with David Allen's weekly review, so at the end of the week, I can go back into my system and look at that overdue folder and understand that that's the work that I have to catch up on that I have to clean up. And then from there, I can create as many other virtual search folders as I need. So for example, I can set up folders based on context. So I can go say, hey, let me get all my next actions that have call at call at the front of the action. At that point, I can go in and see all my calls that I have to do. So I can create as many virtual search folders as I want, I can set them up, tear them down. But all my messages just exist in these two folders, my inbox in my Sent Items, and I'm not using any external software, which is critically important today, as companies locked down their environments and only allow you to use their corporate authorized software. All I'm using is Microsoft Outlook.

Raymond Sidney-Smith 6:55And so Jim, just so the listeners are aware if they aren't aware about virtual search folders. How How does one create? First of all, what is a virtual search folder? And how does one create it not in like a specific version of Outlook, but kind of how does someone manifest a virtual search folder

Jim McCullen 7:15just down on the left hand side, if you scroll down the left of your outlook window, you'll see search folders and you can create a new search folder. And once you select that, you can then go in and select the actual folders you want to look at. So for me, I always select my inbox and my Sent Items. So that's the two sources for this search. And then it allows you to put in any kind of criteria you want. So for example, in most of them, I'll go in and say, I only want to include messages that have a due date. That means they're somewhere in my system, I need to action them still, right. If they don't have a due date, I've finished it, I don't want to see it. I can also go in and say look at categories. So for example,