I would say: use your analog GTD system as usual. Copy into Outlook those things for which you will need timed reminders, or which must be visible to your cow-orkers. Do not rely on Outlook for your trusted system --- regard it as a way of publishing your calendar (and possibly tasks) for others.

Don't move your personal system into your work system: it becomes the property of your employer. Even if your Outlook installation is secure against outsiders and unprivileged insiders, the company's IT staff will have access to everything you put in it. They will have access to things you put into it but deleted (through backups). Do you trust your employer that much?

I struggle with separate home and work GTD systems. It's doable, but brings up a lot of problems. If you want to combine home and work under one system, though, make sure it's something you own and that you control, like your analog system.

Thanks for your quick reply, Jason. These are exactly the sort of concerns I have. I'm very happy with my analog system, but don't look forward to the prospect of entering data in multiple places. Doing so, however, is the most secure.

No, no, no. :)

I also keep the same system for home and work. I review my project list often enough to know what's on it. My work projects are generally more involved, but I like seeing everything that's important to me in one place. I do wish there was a way to further refine my lists. I experimented with separate home and work project lists, but I found that I preferred seeing it all lumped together. I have experimented with wiki solutions to manage my lists and filter out the completed items, but I'm not fully comfortable with being so reliant on what's available right now. At my last job, we had power failures all the time. I'd be the only one left working from my planner :)

I don't disagree with anything Jason said, but I'll add the following ideas as a holdout Outlook/Exchange-phobe in my university:

1. How does the company rely on Outlook/Exchange? Where I'm at, as best I can tell, it's primarily used for email. No task delegation, no assumption of being able to see everyone's calendar or free/busy time, etc. There are exceptions to that, of course. My recollection is that department heads in my college pretty much had to use calendaring so that the Dean's office could figure out when to set meeting times.

2. Following on with 1, what's the least amount of stuff you have to publish via Outlook/Exchange to not irritate your coworkers, or for them to not notice you're not putting 100% of your work life into Outlook? Free/busy availability? Delegating tasks? Do you even have to put your timed reminders into it, assuming you have some other working system that doesn't violate records retention policies or some other regulation?

For me, at least, I can divorce myself from Outlook/Exchange entirely. My boss knows he can email me and I'll read it. He doesn't care how I read it, as long as I can do what I need to (it's forwarded to a Linux mail server I run as part of our lab infrastructure, and I use primarily Thunderbird from the work Windows laptop). Both he and the office staff (and half the college, it seems) has my cell number for more urgent stuff. Nobody has ever tried to sign me up for a meeting via Exchange; they'll call me, email, or ask in person. I've got as good a record-keeping system as any of my coworkers ("When did we last go to that jobsite?" *search DateBk6* "April 11-12".)

We use Outlook and I used to synch it with my Palm - thus providing the link between home and work systems.

We were supposed to be outsourcing our IT (didn't happen in the end) so I decided that having 'unofficial' programs wasn't clever. As a result I've gone completely analogue, except for the work calendar stuff and stuff that comes in via the email (I don't bother copying them across). It's actually working better than the old system.

As for people not using caledaring and such like -- most don't seem to know that you can publish your calendar! (Why that's not the default on our system I don't know). I've never had anyone refuse point-blank when I've asked them to do so.

Steve

I agree with mwr. What is the least amount you can put on Exchange and still meet your cow-orkers' expectations?

At my office, our calendars are expected to be shared so that people, especially supervisors, can see when to schedule meetings, and where you are when you're out of the office during work hours. And we use the scheduling by email that Outlook provides, which means that Outlook for email is unavoidable. But that use pattern also means that really only meetings and out-of-office events have to be copied between systems. It's not that much overhead.