Desktop Widgets - Productivity Sidebars for Outlook

After becoming a fan of David Allen's GTD, I've been in search of the perfect way to manage my calendar and to-do list of projects and action items. While my life is crazy busy in general, working for a marketing agency (search engine marketing at Anvil Media) has exponentially multiplied the need to stay on top of all the client and internal deadlines coming down the pipeline.

I made the decision to stick with Outlook as my information management tool of choice, since it's so (frustratingly) intergrated in my daily life.  Plus, it syncs with my Treo, which never leaves my side.

The question of this particular post is how to create a dashboard of all the information stored in Outlook without having to keep the Today View open all the time. Enter desktop sidebar applications, which sit docked on the edge of your computer desktop and display all the info you need to have on hand. These sidebar widgets can be setup to display upcoming meetings and the tasks due that day, so they are always on your radar. Here are my findings:

• DesktopSidebar is my favorite software of the bunch. It's free, and has an active developer community that is constantly coming up with new widgets. It integrates seamlessly with Outlook, keeping all the info I need right under my mouse. It also has the deepest level of customization of all the desktop sidebar tools -- for example, I have it set to display all my daily work tasks (@office for GTD followers) on my office computer, and all my home duties on my laptop (@home category). A major facet of GTD is contextualizing action items, so that you only see the subset of next actions related to your present situation (so you aren't distracted by tasks that are for another time and place). And, in addition to maximizing the usefulness of Outlook, it also gives you useful tools like weather and multiple item clipboards (so you can copy and paste a series of items, not just one at a time).

• Google Sidebar is the other contender in this class of software, which I had high hopes for. Since I already use Google Desktop Search, it would make sense to also use the sidebar app... Problem is, it just isn't as customizable, nor does it sync with Outlook very well (tasks only, the calendar plugin doesn't work in the newest version). If I didn't want to use Outlook, this would be the way to go -- it's simpler than DesktopSidebar, and one less application to install.

It's worth mentioning that the newest version of Outlook 2007 has a sidebar of sorts, though I've yet to test it -- and I don't have my hopes up. You can also check out Yahoo Widgets (used to be Konfabulator until it was acquired), though I've never found it to be as useful as the others. In the meantime, I'll be sticking with DesktopSidebar.