This post at makeuseof.com no longer applies to me. A while back, I de-outlooked.
In place of the overly cumbersome, memory devouring calendar/email behemoth, I substituted thunderbird with its calendar add-on (lightning), both of which are linked to gmail and gcal. Google Calendar has been doing some decent integration work which allows me, in some cases, to create a calendar entry from an email. This feature has a ways to go.
Because of that distance, I’ve also started using Sandy to manage reminders and to-do items. She’s a virtual personal assistant who has way more capabilities than I’m using. The cool thing about her is that after adding a short email address into my Thunderbird and gmail contacts, Sandy works faultlessly and invisibly. I never have to visit her website at all.
Sandy is built on the stikkit engine. I’ve posted about stikkit before.
I know it sounds complicated, using four different apps to manage to-dos, calendar, and email. But it’s actually easier than using Outlook ever was. It’s also quicker. Much, much quicker! No more spending two or three minutes waiting for Outlook to fire up. Those are minutes I can use to worry think about how many deadlines I have to meet this week.
