OpenNextContextTask

 

The macros and installation guides are stored in this this blog post

In outlook there is a nice feature to open the next email when one is read. To do so change the option as shown.

For my GTD setup, I would like to start doing a context task, for example @Computer and when I mark this task as complete, the next task listed lower and with the same context opens up.

To do so, I used some VBA codes to do so. This current version is crude but serve my purpose. After you install the VBA codes, press ALT-F8 and run the macro “NextContextTask” which is like an on/off switch.

Or you can add a button on the ribbon pointing to this macro. When you press it, it runs the macro and it turn on the feature, the next press will turn off the feature.

 

LIMITATION

 

Outlook 2010 does not allow the programmer to ‘see’ how the current user is looking at his task. It may be group by categories and sorted by Due date as shown above. However, in the @StoryBook  category, the 4 items are ordered using a property known as TodoTaskOrdinal.

For example, if you had a list of tasks 1,2,3, and you keep delaying completing task 2 by changing it’s startdate / duedate. When you add in new task 4,5,6 you may see 4,2,5,6 in your outlook view when you sort by Due date.

However, in the background, task 2 has a higher TodoTaskOrdinal because it was an ‘old’ task. If you look at the todo bar, the sequence of listed task is actually 2,4,5,6. Outlook ‘remember’ that you have been delaying task 2 and rank it higher.

So when you use this macro, sometime you will observe that it skip some obvious tasks and go to other task much lower or higher that the one you just closed. This is because the macro search and open the next task ranked by TodoTaskOrdinal .

At the current moment, it is difficult for one to ‘see’ the actual layout of what the user are looking at because of the XML mechanism Outlook 2010 has adopted. In the future when I have time, I’ll improve it.