Things Done,
http://www.43folders.com/izero
and my own trial and error. One caveat is that I usually never get more
than 100 messages a day; more strategies are probably necessary if you do.
Email is a great place to start trying to amp up your organization, and in
particular to start training yourself to use an inbox. The most important
thing about email is not the program you use or the way your folders are
organized, but your daily processes of dealing with mail.
My inbox is always empty or nearly empty, and that's because of a shift in
mindset I made at one point, between thinking of it as "dealing" with
email and "processing" email. With "dealing with it" my inbox grew into a
huge, anxiety-provoking heap. Now when I check my inbox (way too often), I
zoom through all the new messages one by one - the image I think of is a
ninja, deflecting throwing stars as they come at him - until it's empty
again. How to achieve that is what the rest of this entry is about.
The most important principle is the 10 second rule: if it can be dealt
with in 10 seconds or less, do it, and if it can't, then move it somewhere
else - be *disciplined* about processing your inbox from top to bottom
without stopping to engage with a message. So that means making a snap
judgment about every email as you go through it: delete it, fire off a
quick reply, file it for reference, or put it someplace for more thought:
the Deferred folder, about which more later. The big thing is to take as
much quick action as possible the first time you read it, so you never
have to look at it again. I think of it as sucking all the juice out of
each email, and putting it in other parts of your organizational system.
Don't use your email as a reminder system; use your reminder
system as your reminder system. You should try to have all these
things instantly accessible while processing email, and use them:
- Calendar/day planner for setting up appointments and checking when you
can make appointments for
- A place to record things you might or might not want to go to (i.e. Maybe events)
- Contact list, if someone sends you their phone number etc
- To do lists
- Project list
- Someday/maybe lists, for book or movie recommendations etc
- Inbox folder on your harddrive to download attachments to, to be filed
later (like in your weekly review)
As you can see, emptying your inbox goes best when you've got all the
other aspects of your system working well (especially the calendar and
todo lists) But if you're still getting that under control I think this
approac of emptying the inbox will help regardless.
So now most of the emails that require you to take some action have been
dealt with. Some you can delete now, others you may want to refer back to
in the future: you are keeping them for reference. For that I use Zillion
folder filing, which has as its principle that you should never worry
about creating a new folder on the spot to handle even a single item, as
long as they are organized alphabetically. It took me a little while to
get happy with the way I used these folders; at first I filed by project
or topic, like for instance pigeonresearch. But that was a lot of work,
and there were problems like if an email was about two different topics
(there may be a solution for this in google mail technology, tagging or
some such).
Instead now my folders mostly represent groups of people: one for
correspondence relating to each class that I'm in and each that I TA, one
for toastmasters, one for administrivia from the department etc. There's a
few other folders for special purposes, like one called eventinfo which
has details about events (more than will fit into a calendar entry), and
one called spam for particularly entertaining spams. Basically it's
grouping by why I am keeping it (I don't organize by date or sender name,
because that's pretty easy to search or sort by). Of course many emails I
want to keep purely for sentimental reasons, and those go into a folder
called personal. Over time, personal has become the folder where I throw
anything that doesn't fit neatly into one of the others, and that seems to
work ok. Personal is the only folder I put a lot of effort into backing
up.
All in all there's 100 folders, which is definitely manageable both in
Pine and web-based email. Within-folder searches have saved my butt many a
time.
Now there's the last part of my system, the one that still inspires a
small amount of dread - though minor compared to how much my enormous
inbox used to. And that's the Deferred folder, where I chuck email I can't
deal with in less than 10 seconds. Only after my inbox is empty do I go
back and look into these. I try not to let it hijack my day, especially if
it's just writing a reply to a fun note (this is why you will sometimes
hear back a few days or a week or a month from sending something - but
hopefully you will always hear back). Yeah this is the hairy one, and I
have to make sure that despite some psychological resistance I open it up
on a regular basis (at *least* once a week) and see what's there, see what
I can make progress on, and make sure nothing that has a deadline
approaching. I think in an ideal theoretical system, there would be no
need for a Deferred folder but a todo list would replace most of the need
for it. But in practice thats just too cumbersome for me. I can say that
*eventually* everything is dealt with; it does turn over, and almost none
go back more than 2 months, plus its never more than 25 items - and that's
including friends' funny youtube links, and journal article alerts. As a
rule of thumb it shouldn't be more than one page.
So the 10 second rule, not using email as a reminder, zillion folder
filing, the personal and Deferred folders. With all these tricks and
techniques, I now feel like I have my email well in hand, which is
especially important when the student questions or participant
signups start flying.
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