Moosecamp is the name for the first day of the two day NorthernVoice blogging conference going on in Vancouver. It’s a loosely self-organized day of discussions on Friday, in advance of the full day of formal presentations Saturday. Two days of geeking out with like-minded people; I can’t wait!

Tags: Northern Voice, NorthernVoice, Moosecamp, Vancouver Blogging Conference

As I’ve documented previously, I’ve been struggling with performance issues in Outlook for a long time. Well, a friend gave me a suggestion a few days ago that I finally got around to trying today. That suggestion had been made to me in the past, but I wasn’t ready to believe it was the reason for my performance problems. Now I’m a believer.

What was the solution? Simply to remove the Getting Things Done Outlook Add-In. Well, not so simply, it turns out. NetCentrics, the developers of this plug-in, somehow don’t deem it necessary to provide a complete uninstaller for the plug-in. So, even if you uninstall it, the GTD Outlook Add-In leaves a bunch of cruft in your installation of Outlook. Luckily, a user on the David Allen forums posted a complete guide to actually removing the plug-in.

Note that once removed, my friend suggested that I run SCANPST (a utility that is installed with Microsoft Office, but not found on any menu - you have to search for it on your file system to find it), which repaired at least 11 corruptions within my PST file.

The end result is a far snappier installation of Outlook - so much so that I’m actually amazed. This is the performance I’ve been looking for.

So, do I still subscribe to the tenets of David Allen’s Getting Things Done workflow? Yep. But now I’m using version Clear Context 2.0’s Information Management System, which includes some very GTD-friendly functions like turning emails into tasks, and grouping information like emails, tasks and appointments by projects. Very cool. Note that Clear Context 2.0 is beta, but it’s good. Very good. Get it good.

And my Outlook is fast, finally!

(Chris, I’m sorry I didn’t follow your advice on this months ago!)

Tags: Outlook, Outlook performance, Outlook speed issues, Outlook 2003, pst file, Clear Context, ClearContext

I was recently interviewed by Gerald Bauer for Vancouver 2.0 for a series of blogger interviews they have been doing. My interview went up on the site yesterday. Doing this sort of thing is new to me, but I think it went okay. The series has been great so far, too - I’ve added a few feeds from local bloggers to my news reader from reading it.

Tags: Vancouver interview, interview, Vancouver 2.0, blogger interviews