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A good day's work: cleaning up the mail pile
time to read 1 min | 149 words
For the last three months or so I have been in a race to keep up with my mail.
I tend to star & mark as unread as ways to remind me that I need to do something with them, but I am bothered if I have things to do that are marked in this fashion. Especially since some of those have rotted there since August. I kept meaning to do something about it, and more interesting things kept coming up. I dedicated today to handling this once and for all, I went from over 60 items that needed taking care of to 4.
More importantly, I have no unread mails in my mailbox, which means that I am much happier.
Oh, and if you sent me an email recently that I never replied to, that probably means that I won't answer it unless you will ping me again.
Comments
Ah ZeroBounceMail.... so nice.
We just went from GroupWise to Outlook here at work and I am thrilled. Once again can I use categories, folders and macros to get some GetThingsDone goodness happening. I don't follow David Allen's steps exactly still but the little bit I do implement makes a huge difference.
Simplest thing to do is setup some labels for actions: @WaitingFor, @Call, @Computer, @Home, @Downtime and some contexts/projects: blog, Rhino-Tools, SuperDuperSecretProject, other.
When mail comes in, if it needs an action, label it, and give it a context. If you need to save it I even email myself tasks so that they get in the pipeline.
So anything that comes in gets deleted (junk), made into a task or archived under a project, other (general small tasks, etc.). Just remember that tasks should be exact and imperitive: Patch Generics Handling in IWatchYouMayCallIt. Also, setup an inbox rule to forward CC'd and BCC'd mail as well as listserves subfolders that way your inbox is stuff that is addressed directly to you.
There are some core priciples that make it reading the book worth it and your attempt successful. Until you get your copy, you can read also 43Folders.com.
http://www.43folders.com/2004/09/08/getting-started-with-getting-things-done
Casey,
I use the old "everything in the inbox, unread/starred if it deserve more attention".
I tend to use the simple rule of "if I have forgotten about it, then it must not have been important enough to do something about"
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