Inbox processing

My day starts with checking email. I use Outlook at work and GMail personally, but the system is pretty much the same for each. On average, I will have received 30-60 emails overnight, mainly replies from colleagues in the US and UK. These are triaged according to the ever-present 4 Ds: Delete, Do, Delegate and Defer.

Delete: This is fairly straightforward – if I don’t need to keep the email for reference after reading it or if it is spam etc., it gets deleted.

Do: If the email requires an action of less than two minutes, that action gets done straight away. Usually, this is a quick reply or a system update and doesn’t take long at all. Once the action is done, the email is either deleted, or filed away in a reference folder in case it is needed later on. Often, this just involves reading the email, realising there is no associated action and filing it for reference.

Delegate: Not all of my emails require me to do something, often I can pass them along or arrange for someone else to complete the task. Again, this takes less than two minutes and is done on the spot. Once completed, the original email is either deleted, filed for reference or, if I am waiting for a reply or need to follow up on the delegated action, it is moved to my ‘@waiting for’ folder.

Defer: What’s left now are the emails that can’t be deleted, sent elsewhere or will take longer than two minutes to complete. Typically, this will be about 20% of emails, meaning that the 30-60 that arrived have now become 6-12 after just a few minutes – much more manageable. These emails are read and the larger projects and next actions necessitated by the email are identified. These next actions are entered into my action lists on Remember The Milk, which is always available on my second monitor using Netvibes, along with a list of current projects and a lot of other useful information. The email is then moved to the ‘@actions’ folder in Outlook.

Using this system, the 30-60 emails that were in my inbox are usually cleared within about 25 minutes, depending on the day. I am now operating from a zero base again. The psychological effect of this needs to be experienced to be believed – and it’s still only 9.30 in the morning!

A note about my email folders: I only keep my active projects in folders in my main email area, all my old projects and reference materials are stored in PST files. This makes it easy to collapse or close the reference material folders when I need to focus on project work. So, my main email folder view is basically:

Mail
-Inbox
-@actions
-@waiting for
-Project 1
–Subfolder
-Project 2
–Subfolder
-Project 3
–Subfolder

Prioritisation

Now I can start work on my actions for the day. The ‘hard landscape’ is tracked in the Outlook calendar. This only contains the meetings and events that are booked in for specific times or any all-day activities.
I keep a lot of information in Remember The Milk lists, not all of it work-related and not all of it actions. Using the tags function together with smart lists, I can create a list of work actions sorted by date. These may have been entered while processing email, or they could have been quickly entered at any other stage using the Netvibes page. The great thing about Remember The Milk is that it makes it very easy to work with your lists, so I can also enter tasks via SMS, Twitter, email, iPhone or in a number of other ways. In addition to the tasks I’ve manually added, repeating tasks also appear. These may be for things like preparing for weekly meetings and the task can be set to recur after a certain time. Looking at the smart list, I can see at a glance everything that needs to be done today, in the coming few days and also those tasks that don’t have a due date.

Unlike a lot of GTD setups, I have very few ‘contexts’. The vast majority of my work is done sitting at my desk with access to email, the internet and the phone. However, when I need to create context specific lists and tasks, this is easily done by adding another tag to the task in Remember The Milk and creating a matching smart list to display these tasks. In my situation, most tasks are covered by the @home and @work contexts.

I also don’t use any kind of prioritisation when listing tasks. I find that without the stress of a huge list of emails in my inbox or piles of papers on my desk and with the ability to see all my outstanding tasks at once, I have a much clearer view of my next actions and can decide priorities quite easily, based on time at hand and energy available.

Doing the work

Then the task is worked on. I keep my supplies (all work in progress) in a set of labeled folders in a drawer that is swivel distance from my computer. This gets my desk clear and everything in one place. As my desk is kept clear, I can easily tell what I’m working on at any given time and can give it full attention. Once a task is done, the task is marked complete and the work goes back into the folder. The next action for the project is identified and is added to my list of actions. If the project is still in progress, it goes back into the supplies drawer; however, if the project has been finished, I move the folder to my reference material – a set of shelves close to my desk. These shelves are close enough to quickly access my reference material, but far enough away to keep things out of the way. Again, once I have finished working on a task, my desk is clear and ready to start something new.

Using this technique, I can move through each of the tasks on my list and dedicate my time and attention to each one fully. Should I be interrupted, I am able to quickly return to the task at hand as it is the only thing on my desk. I find David Allen’s ‘mind like water’ saying to be quite accurate, and I also like to apply it to my workspace – everything is calm and empty to start, then the workspace reacts to the task at hand with as much paperwork, mess or clutter as is needed. Then everything is restore to the original calm again, ready for new stimulus.

This is how most workdays are run. I use one notebook, a lined Moleskine with a handmade Gfeller leather cover (that I previously covered here), to take all my meeting notes in and any actions that come up are flagged during the meeting. When I return to my desk, these are moved on to my Remember The Milk lists and crossed out of the notebook. This limits the number of ‘collection buckets’ I have to manage.

The Review

Ask any GTD practitioner and they will soon tell you that the cornerstone of any good GTD implementation is the weekly review. My weekly review is scheduled into my calendar at 4.00 on Friday afternoon. During the review, I’ll go through each inbox I have: email, voicemail, notebook, desk, etc and will process everything. Then I’ll look over my calendar to make sure I have all my actions captured for events in the coming week. I then review the list of current projects and add or remove items as appropriate, followed by a full review of every action that I have on my lists, making sure that nothing has fallen through the gaps in my system and renegotiating any tasks that have changed. I’ll also review all my supporting information and move anything completed to my reference files. The reference files are also reviewed briefly, with anything outdated thrown out.

This usually takes about 30-40 minutes and covers the complete system. Once I’ve finished the review, I know that all of my projects and tasks are up to date and safely captured. This means I finish the week with nothing on my mind and can enjoy the weekend without any niggling thoughts about work.

So there you have it, my complete GTD system in five parts. As I’ve said, the change this has brought about in my professional life has been amazing and I still can’t work out how I managed to cope before implementing all of this.

If you have any questions or comments about my setup, or if you would like to share yours, I’d love to here from you in the comments below.

(link to part 1)
(link to part 2)
(link to part 3)
(link to part 4)

My requirements were:

• Online – While I am a huge Moleskine fan and use one for all my day-to-day notes (check out my review of the beautiful Gfeller Moleskine cover here), I needed the flexibility of an online system to be able to reorganise and arrange items easily. Being online also means being accessible from anywhere there is an internet connection.
• Free, or cheap – I didn’t want my system to be expensive to maintain, so cost was definitely a consideration.
• Versatile – Some systems do GTD strictly by the book, without much room to move. The system I was going to use had to be able to withstand some customisation.
• Accessible – Being online is good, but having a variety of ways to get to my system is essential. If it’s a trusted system, then everything needs to be able to be entered, at any time. It’s no good having to wait to get back to a PC to offload an idea or task.

I didn’t have to look too far to find a product that matched or excelled all of these requirements: Remember The Milk. RTM is an amazing product – it’s online and reliable, even providing Gears support for offline use; it’s free, with a paid option to increase connectivity to Windows Mobile and Blackberries; and it’s one of the most accessible services I’ve seen yet, as it works with: Twitter, Netvibes, iGoogle, Google Calendar, GMail, Outlook, RSS, Firefox sidebar, iPhone, mobile browsers, SMS and the list goes on.

Once I decided on RTM, I took all the actionable items left over from the cleanup and placed each on an #Actions list. Then I filed all the hardcopy material away, but still close to hand, as I no longer needed the piles on my desk to remind myself of what needed to be done. The #Actions list then got tagged with contexts. I realised I didn’t need a whole lot of contexts, so these ended up just being @work and @home. These contexts were supplemented by tags (including +waiting for and +tickle) and dates. Using combinations of tags, smart lists can be created; for example, creating a smart list sorted by date of everything with an @work tag from the #Actions list gives me my todo list at work, including things I’m waiting for and things I’ve deferred, while a smart list sorting by @work, +waiting for and +john shows all work tasks I’m waiting on John for.

Another list, titled #Projects, tracks the individual projects I’m working on and are tagged in a similar way as tasks, with an additional GTD altitude tag, such as +20000 (there’s a good explanation of GTD altitudes here). These projects all have related tasks on the #Actions list. #Agenda is another useful list, with + tags indicating agenda items for particular meetings or people (for example, +john or +review). When I’m preparing for a meeting, I can pull up a list of #Agenda items with a particular tag and have everything ready to go. A #Someday list tracks everything I’m not yet ready to commit to, so I can relax while knowing what I’m not doing.

I also maintain an #I/O list, with +buy, +rent, +lend and +borrow tags to track things I need to get, or have borrowed and lent. I have a bad habit of lending things out and promptly forgetting where they went or borrowing something and forgetting where it came from, so this is a convenient way to track everything. There are also a number of other lists in the system that just make use of the RTM functionality, such as a list of weekly review steps, or even a shopping list.

I use two monitors at work, and have a custom Netvibes page on the left monitor using Google’s Chrome browser application shortcut tool that prominently displays the #Actions/@work list. I check this to see what needs to be done and can quickly enter new tasks into the system here as well, complete with tagging and due dates. In addition to this, Outlook 2007 on my primary screen is synced to the RTM calendar feeds, and my tasks show up on my Outlook work calendar, making it simple to review the ‘hard landscape’ of my calendar appointments while also checking the day’s tasks. When I’m at home, GMail and Google Calendar both show my RTM tasks. I have set a bookmarklet to load the RTM iGoogle widget in the Firefox sidebar both at home and at work, giving one click access to viewing and adding tasks.

I use a Nokia E65 (while waiting for an iPhone…) which is always on me and has customisable quick keys. One of these is programmed to the RTM mobile site to quickly check my lists, while adding tasks on the go can be done by sending an SMS to RTM via Twitter, just by adding ‘d rtm’ to the start of the message.

Put simply, using Remember The Milk, I can check and add tasks in a central location easily, anywhere. RTM’s flexible search functionality lets me create a variety of automatically-updating lists based on tagging and dates and can also accommodate other lists as they are needed. If the RTM team comes up with Outlook syncing or a Symbian application, I would not hesitate to pay for the Pro upgrade. Even better, they’re also an Australian-based team!

While I continue to look at new and try different GTD tools (quite a distraction in itself), I always come back to Remember The Milk. For me, it really has become a trusted system. In the final part of this series, I’ll detail my workflow and how I make the whole system work for me, everyday.

(link to part 1)
(link to part 2)
(link to part 3)
(link to part 5)

After jumping on the GTD bandwagon and getting most of my daily life in order (see my series of posts on this, starting here), I’ve started slipping down the other side of the peak. I now have the energy and time to invest into other projects (or ‘creative work’, in Mann’s post); however, this has been wasted by more playing with productivity pron (43 Folders included…), reading too many feeds, half attempts at projects and other pointless, generally time-sapping, activities.

This needs to stop – it’s basically a waste of the new-found energy and effort I worked so hard to find. Taking a lead from Mann, this means I’ll be trying to refocus my efforts as well moving forward on some of the things that have been on the back of my mind and sitting on the Someday/Maybe list. I’ll finish my own series of posts on GTD, then consolidate this site and other online profiles under my own name at simongoudie.com, cut back on feeds, slash Twitter followings, cull other online time-sinks and start looking to use the extra energy on worthwhile pursuits.

Of course, the first problem is realising what exactly these pursuits or muses are; however, this seems as good a time as any to discover them. In short, I’ll take on three out of Mann’s five goals: cut the noise, walk the truer walk and make things count for me. Let’s see what happens after that.

Thanks for the insightful post, Merlin, I look forward to following 43 Folders (and YLNT) in future, in whatever form that is.

KM2P ver. 2 by hawkexpress

The next stage was to ensure that everything I had dug up in my initial sweep was dealt with. This meant one of four things had to happen to each and every item in my physical and electronic baskets:

1. Do it. If there was a simple action directly associated with the item that would only take a couple of minutes to complete, I just did it and cleared it off my plate.
2. Defer it. If the action needed to complete the item was too involved to do there and then, the item went into an actions basket to be tackled later, in the third round of organising. Similarly, if the action was to happen at a later date, the item ended up in the same basket.
3. Delegate it. Some things just weren’t mine. These items found their way to their rightful owner
4. File it. In case the item didn’t have an action associated with it, but couldn’t be thrown out, it ended up in a basket to be filed.

At the end of this round, I was starting to feel pretty good. After finishing all the quick tasks and offloading all the delegated tasks, things were beginning to feel back under control. I had a clean desk, clean inbox and two clear baskets left: Actions and Filing.

Filing was fairly straightforward. After being so ruthless with throwing away whatever really didn’t need to be kept, I was able to fill one shelf of archive material (kept away from my desk) and one drawer of reference material, kept in clearly labelled folders close at hand. This allowed me to remove many of the extra shelves from my desk, as they weren’t needed anymore. The fewer flat surfaces around me, the less chance I had to start building piles of paper up again. Suddenly, I had my whole desk back again!

At this point, everything I had done could have been seen as a once-off effort to clear the decks and tidy up (and were, judging by the puzzled comments of colleagues). However, I knew that it had to be more than that. I had to implement a system to ensure that things didn’t slide back into the mess that they were to start with. That’s when I started work on my basket of actionable items and began to put in place a plan to keep everything under control, regardless of how hectic things got…

(link to part 1)
(link to part 2)
(link to part 4)
(link to part 5)

Sweep by ishrona

I read a few pages here and there online and, when almost every concept I came across starting hitting home, I went and picked up the first copy I could find. For a start, I read the whole thing before I started any actions, just to work out exactly what was going on. Then I went back to the start and worked through a second time, this time putting the ideas into action. I don’t think my workspace know what hit it.

I chose a corner of my desk and worked through every pile, every paper, every note and scribble until I reached the opposite corner. Most of it ended up in the bin. Piles and piles of plain old junk. The rest was lumped in the process basket without distinction. Then the shelving got the same treatment. Then the drawers. Then the filing. My estimate would be that I threw out around 80% of the material I had lying around.

The electronic desktop was next. My Windows desktop alone ran at 1024×1280 and was completely covered with files, let alone what was on the company and personal network drives. The same principle held: start at the first folder and work through each of them, deleting or leaving for processing.

The emails came last, and were the most daunting; however, once started, it soon became much easier to make the cut here as well. Once they had been worked over, all that was left was one big physical pile of ‘stuff’ and one big electronic pile. Let the processing begin…

(link to part 1)
(link to part 3)
(link to part 4)
(link to part 5)

Stacks by Salerie

Until recently, I let a large number of posts slide by me in my feed reader, just because they had ‘Getting Things Done’ or ‘GTD’ in the title. At that stage, Getting Things Done just seemed like some productivity cult or fad that a few people had picked up on and couldn’t stop banging on about. This was the same stage as when my idea of organisation at work was the ‘Sunflower’ method, ie. a ring of yellow Post-It notes around my monitor, each with a to-do on it, or something else I needed to remember. Filing was done in piles on my desk, which were sometimes literally taller than I was when sitting in front of them. I had years worth of work and paper on my desk and kept trying to find new surfaces to put more piles on. Not to mention my email inbox, which could easily number into the high hundreds on any given day.

It was apparent to everyone but myself that this was an issue. My work was reactive, in that it took prompting before I’d remember to do something. I’d rely on what emails came in to dictate what I had to do. Deadlines became problems and then slipped to not even being attainable goals. Every performance review I had was fine, but ended up in the same direction: the need to improve my organisation and initiative. Not that I took heed of this. It wasn’t until we moved office and I was able to start with a fresh space did it occur to me that not only could I change the way I worked, I would have to if I wanted to keep working. That’s when I started thinking about GTD again, this time a bit more seriously…

(link to part 2)
(link to part 3)
(link to part 4)
(link to part 5)