A month ago I had 250 messages in my inbox. Today I have 25. Here‘s how I did it. Perhaps this might be useful to you as well. The method is geared toward Outlook users.1
As I wrote in The Anxiety of Getting Things Done, one of the problems I have with the GTD system is the State of Grace:
In order for the GTD system to really work, you have to trust that your task list is comprehensive and complete. You have to capture everything that you have to do and organize it into projects. You (ideally) should have everything sorted, and filed. Take a few days to get yourself organized, the book advises. A few days? I thought, looking at towering piles of papers. Try a few weeks.The real problem is, if you aren‘t in this state of grace, the value of GTD drops precipitiously. Because you can‘t trust that your list of tasks and projects is actually complete. There‘s still the lurking anxiety that somewhere in that pile of papers you haven‘t attacked yet is something you really really need to do.
Maybe it‘s just me, but trying to get into this state is anxiety-producing in itself, especially if you‘re trying to get work done at the same time.
For many of us, one of the hardest places in our lives to achieve the State of Grace is our email inboxes. There‘s that constant inflow of messages, ranging from the important to the informative to the amusing to the offensive. There‘s spam. And there‘s our tendency, even after reading David Allen‘s book, to use our inbox as a to-do list.
So what to do? I‘ve read up on methods like 43 Folders‘ Process to Zero. My main problem with this method (and David Allen‘s) is that your important messages, the ones you are supposed to actually do something about, are put into a folder (@Action or @Process or whatever). Which is fine in theory. In practice, whenever I try to use this method, I do not open the @Action folder. Why? Simple. Because I don‘t have to. It‘s Pandora‘s folder, and I know that all the things I‘m anxious about lie within. So I don‘t touch the damn thing. The problem is worse instead of better.
My inbox, on the other hand, leaves me no choice. I have to open it. But I need a way to deal with a 250-message inbox. A way that won‘t cause me more anxiety than the third-rail folder solution.
So here‘s what we‘re going to do: we‘re going to temporarily hide the "Action" emails, enabling us to concentrate on sorting (or quickly dealing with) the rest.
What we will need:
The setup:
First you‘re going to create a new View for your inbox. What this View will do is hide all of today‘s emails. We‘re working on our backlog, so we‘re not going to worry about today‘s messages for the next half hour. The View will also hide any messages with Flags. More on Flags in a bit. Here‘s how to make the "Triage" View:
Once that is set up, close all other programs. No instant messagers, no web browsers, no nothing. Turn your cellphone off (or on vibrate, if you must) and if you can take your phone off the hook, do it.
Now set the timer for a five minute countdown. Your emails are now sorted by Subject, A-Z. You‘re going to deal with as many as you can in five minutes. For each message, you must take one of these five action steps.
The action steps:
Lather, rinse, repeat.
Once the five minutes are up, you‘re going to resort and repeat. You‘ll do six five-minute runs, each with the following sorts:
Why do it this way? First, breaking it into five minute chunks is easier than one half-hour slog. Second, the different sorts mix it up, forcing you to deal with emails that are scattered througout your inbox. (If there were a random sort function, that would be even better, but there‘s not.) And third, we‘ve deliberately saved the sort by date ones for last. Presumeably, the messages you didn‘t deal with yesterday have a higher API (Anxiety Provoking Index, which I just made up). Same with those messages from eight months ago that are at the bottom of your inbox. So we‘ll deal with them last. Hey, even if you‘ve only flagged them as emails you‘ve got to answer, at least you‘ve sorted with them.
So six sorts x five minutes = half an hour. You should be able to get through at least 30 emails, one a minute, in this fashion. More, once you get the hang of it. In your last five minutes, transcribe your To-Dos from your paper into your Task list. Switch back to your normal Inbox view. And if you‘re feeling especially virtuous, tackle one of your flagged messages. Or just take a break. You deserve it!
Update: You may also want to check out Adrian Trenholm‘s Tickling email in Outlook system for another use of views to manage your Inbox.
1 For a Gmail solution, check out GTDGmail.
Mike, I‘m still astonished you‘re using Windows. If any OS lends itself to a State of Grace, it‘s certainly not going to be coming out of Bill Gate‘s shop.
Comment #1 :: link :: August 27, 2006 10:15 AMMichael, at work I don‘t have a choice. Ditto with using Outlook.
Comment #2 :: link :: August 27, 2006 01:44 PMSame here. Our tax software company only makes software that works for Windows. :-(
Mike, this is terrific. I used it this morning. The timers keep me working quickly, and I got my inbox under 13,000! Yes, I now have 12,979 emails in my inbox. Pitiful, ain‘t it? They go back to 2002. I get literally hundreds a day and I just don‘t spend the time deleting. I figure if I spend 35 minutes a day, I might just get up-to-date in a year or so. :-) Still, it‘s a great system. Thanks for passing it on.
Comment #3 :: link :: August 28, 2006 11:08 AMUmmm, maybe I shouldn‘t mention this in polite society, but I do use my inbox as a to-do list (seems to work for me). And I can‘t tolerate (and, therefore, won‘t allow) more than 20 emails in my inbox -- it causes me severe anxiety. I‘m militant about filing emails as soon as I‘ve acted on them.
If an email has a long-term to-do, I file it and add the to-do to my long-term to-do list. For the long-term list, I used to use Palm Desktop, but I am now using Stickies on OS X.
I also sometimes use actual paper stickies on the side of the computer monitor for short-term to-dos that didn‘t originate as email. (I feel a bit silly about this, but it works as long as the darn things don‘t fall off -- sometimes I use Scotch tape if it‘s really important.)
I suspect that any system, though, that works for the kind of people who can‘t tolerate more than 20 emails in their inbox (like me) is not the system that will work for the kind of people who have hundreds or thousands of emails in their inbox.
Comment #4 :: link :: August 28, 2006 02:47 PMDavid: 13,000 emails. Alex: No more than 20.
Well, no one can say I don‘t have diverse friends....
Comment #5 :: link :: August 29, 2006 10:37 AMM E-L...I got here from your comment at 43 Folders. Wow, thanks for the post!
Your comment is right where I am: I have an @Action folder in Outlook, but I ignore it because I can ignore it!!
Drives me nuts.
I‘m going to try your system. Today. Thanks for posting this.
Comment #6 :: link :: August 31, 2006 09:58 AM
Hope this is helpful and no imposition.
I have a new site that could be calming, comforting to you.
Please take a look.
dave
http://waterfallsuplift.blogspot.com
Comment #7 :: link :: October 4, 2006 03:43 PMSome interesting tips here that I will try to integrate into my own technique for dealing with this problem. But I‘d like to run parts of my current way of dealing with this issue up the flagpole to see whether others find it useful.
1) Flag stuff that should be filed to a central location when time permits, but does not require actual response or action. Mailing list stuff, receipts, shipping notifications, etc. as well as any email that contains info that should become part of the company‘s permanent documentation. (in the case of my job, IP config changes, VPN config changes, and so on). Do the actual filing/backing up at the end of the day.
2) NEVER flag anything that requires action or response in the near term. Even if the response is "my schedule is too tight to complete the task in question now, can we do it at X time?", get it out the "door" so to speak.
3) make filtering solely sender-based, as it is generally the case that the sender of a given message is a good predictor of how urgent and/or useful their message will be.
4) You have a keyboard, use it. If you come in after a long weekend and have 87 unread messages, it is likely that over half of them require no more than a quick once-over and filing/deletion. So use your PgUp/PgDown to look over the whole list and figure out what‘s what. Find groups of emails that can all be addressed in the same way or deleted and use your #^&$ shift key to do it all at once. Much time is lost by going through long lists of email and filing/deleting one at a time.
5) I completely disagree with the idea of turning off IM. Using IM with an SN that only those who work you closely with you know saves a lot of time with email. If I have info or a question for a co-worker or my boss that can be communicated and responded to in less than 3 sentences, why wait? Or have to wonder if the person is near their computer at the moment?
6) Whenever it applies, respond to emails by pulling up the necessary info on your machine, PrintScrn‘ing it, and pasting directly into Outlook. It removes a lot of the "playing telephone" factor that generates additional email due to miscommunication.
Comment #8 :: link :: December 31, 2006 10:08 PM联系客服
