While thinking about email in general, and its weaknesses, I stumbled upon a way of looking at email that in our 3 years I’ve never been able to articulate – it’s entirely reactive, and thus horrible at trying to organise it around your own schedule.
Why is it reactive? Because you are always responding to events that happen to you – namely, an email arriving. In other areas of work this kind of behaviour would be called “fighting fires” – there’s always a new outburst of flame demanding attention.
No client or methodology is particularly well suited to saying “I’m going to ignore this email for a while, and then efficiently process it as a batch with similar emails (at a time that suits me)”.
I.e. No client is supporting proactive email processing.
I think we come quite close – we encourage emails to be actioned, deferred, and grouped together; but it’s missing one big thing… Goals.
Goals are what would truly enable us to be confident and proactive. To say, “these are my outcomes for today / this week”, then pull up the actioned emails associated with those goals, and process them.
These thoughts are helping refine our GTDInbox methodology for taking email productivity up a level. More as it comes!
Hi, in that line I managed, after many attempts, to **really** and **efficiently** tickle an email. The solution is so simple!, and maybe my solution inspires you for a more permanent and embedded solution in GTDInbox.
So, what I did is create two context labels “NextWeek” and “NextMonth” (this works for me, others may need more refined timeslots). So when an email requires action, but not today, I just label it “NExt Week” or “Next Month” depending on how long in the future I want to “kick” it. Then, I created a search (which BTW I show in a gmail multiple inbox right below the main inbox) that shows all Next Actions that are not labeled NextWeek nor NextMonth. This way I can clear up my todo list from those todos that do not require immediate action, but should be triggered at a certain time.
Finally, at the begining of a week (or a month) I just goes through all the items labeled NextWeek (or NextMonth) and remove the label if they are ready for immediate action.
@gamelux, your solution is very interesting, I didn’t see it that way, it will help unclog our lists.
I find compose personal very useful for this matter of proactivity, because when I am in “collect” mode I mail myself with all the tasks I need to do for myself, then i organize them.
On the other hand, the mails we recieve hardly describe the task to be done on it’s subject or even it’s body, making me to waste time or distract when checking my TODO lists, so, my solution might seem overwork but it’s kinda helpful, it integrates the tasks feature of gmail and it’s based on, I believe, one post made in this blog some time ago:
I have 2 lists “Actions” and “Next Actions”, in wich I organize all mails belonging to this lists converting them to tasks, I then set due dates for the tasks I kick to the “Next Action” list and sort them by due date, when I finish processing tasks in my action list I check next action list and move the closest tasks to the action list again.
Maybe it would be useful to automate this with GTD inbox and finally integrate it with gmail task features.
It would also be nice if tasks in Google Calendar integrate reminders and if we could search tasks and tasks metadata in gmail search.
That would make gmail and GTD Inbox the ultimate productivity tool, for me, i think.
There is a way to integrate Gmail and Tasks with Calendar.
Basically, you add the Calendar Gadget to Gmail and then Share your Tasks with the Calendar.
Under “More Actions” you should see “Add to Tasks”
Enable Google Calendar in Gmail | Settings | Labs:
http://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#settings/labs
Then add Tasks to Calendar.
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=144246
Under Gmail Calendar | Settings | Calendars you need to enable Tasks [x].
->> Josh W. <<-
thats good thinking. i agree. its nice that youre stepping back.
there is a very specific point at which email turns from reactive to proactive, GTD speaking, and i can pinpoint it: when you get to zero.
when there is nothing left in your inbox to react to, THEN you choose a context, and quite naturally select a project bucket and off you proactively.
so, if GTDinbox actively insisted/enforced/prodded one to KEEP his inbox at zero, that would keep us closer to the proactivity side.
how would that be done? just an idea to start out with- a default inbox labelbrowser that enforces top down, touch once, processing. its a hard thing to get used to. we need practice. this could help.
there would be no forward/backward arrows. only this:
- optional context select
- optional project select
- optional user-created-dimension select
- MANDATORY ONE BUTTON status select. so as soon as you click a status, youre on to the next inbox item to process. AND there is no moving on unless you do choose a status.
(of course you can provide ESC. (option to turn disable ESC!))
i did this this once using 5 function keys (statuses) in thunderbird. its the only thing that got me from 2000 to zero. it really worked.
a key thing to learn in GTD is fast confident inbox processing- so that you can get on with the productivity! i guess thats the name of the tool (a modified label browser) that im talking about, the “Inbox Processor”.
I forward a lot of emails to my Action email address and have a Gmail filter that automatically stars them. Then I go to my inbox and assign due dates to them. I have a label for each month of the year and a label for each day of the month, as well as a label for Today. They look like this D/Month/January or D/Day/12 or D/Today. I don’t use Today as a status because, logically it is time period rather than an indicator of how I intend to handle the email.
I have tried to eliminate any separate task lists, e.g., in Outlook, RTM, or GMail Tasks, since maintaining a separate task list consumers time and creates ambiguity. Simply tagging my tasks appropriately in Gmail works for me.
I keep a separate log of what I do during the work day so I can bill by the hour when necessary, so I don’t need to maintain a to do list of completed items. This further simplifies my work flow.
For projects that require more detailed planning, I create a separate email that is tagged with the project label but has a subject line such as Project Tracking — Name of Project. I keep forwarding itself to my Action email with notes, updates on tasks, etc. This automatically time stamps changes I make to it and provides me with a running log combined with a plan and task list for that project or sub-project.
By keeping all information and tasks in Gmail as much as possible, I keep my work flow simple so I can focus on getting things done rather than keeping track of what I have done or planning what I will do next.
Hi,
there is a client tat supports that – Chandler does exactly this.
It goes one step further by unifying emails and appointments/remminders.
Dave
Goals good Point, really looking forward to process emails in a convient way to filter personal or business goals
[...] Email is too reactive « GTDInbox — Blog "Why is e-mail reactive? Because you are always responding to events that happen to you – namely, an email arriving. In other areas of work this kind of behaviour would be called “fighting fires” – there’s always a new outburst of flame demanding attention. No client or methodology is particularly well suited to saying “I’m going to ignore this email for a while, and then efficiently process it as a batch with similar emails (at a time that suits me)”. I.e. No client is supporting proactive email processing. (tags: e-mail problems productivity processes software psychology) [...]
Hi, very interesting points. Let me take the liberty to highlight the best of the above comments:
1) For tickling (i.e., time stamping) an email, use time contexts (either a context status or a user dimension), such as X/NextWeek, X/NextMonth, or day/month tags such as D/Day/12 and D/Month/January (this latter one would work as a 43 folders). (I used to use the 43 folder version, but the granularity was too much for my needs, nextWeek and nextMonth are perfect for my needs (but most certainly not for everybody’s needs!).
2) (needs GTDInbox to implement it) A batch processor of emails to better enforce zero-inbox and get faster to proactivity.
3) forward an incoming email to one-self with more informative subjects to help making the todo list easier to read. I do have one concern though: doing this you would loose the original email as part of the conversation, right? how do you solve this?
4) (somehow related to (3)) Maintain a conversation for project tracking: send an email to yourself tagged with the project label and with subject line “Project Tracker”, each email content would contain ideas/actions related to the project. I love this one! and will most certainly incorporate it in my Gmail’s GTD practice. Thanks Peyton!
Thank you all for such great ideas!
There are two things I need for email:
1. Ability to annotate it. I brute force this by forwarding emails to myself with the annotations I want. But perhaps GMail will internalize this concept at some point.
2. Ability to filter based on whether the sender’s email address is in my contacts or not. I can’t believe Google hasn’t done this yet (despite my numerous pings
Nevertheless, I think GTDInbox helps a lot — at the end of the day, you still have to impose a certain amount of discipline on yourself.
Hi Jim,
I’m really interested in hearing more about your 2nd point (filtering by known contacts). What exactly would you like to achieve with this?
It’s an area I think GTDInbox can do worthwhile things with, but it would really help to understand how you’d specifically want to use it.
Andy