It sounds like there's no clear differentiation between supporting project materials and actionable "later" emails that you haven't yet input into Things.
Whenever an email requires an action, I hit 's' for star, and then go through my starred items regularly and input them into my project management system (pen and paper ... haven't met a software program that's worked for me yet, and I'm a strong believer that your process has to be there first, and then a program may or may not be available to fit that process). Once the action has been captured, I un-star (but it maintains the project label throughout).
It also might be easier to name your labels after the project name and not the area. This makes it really easy to find only exactly what you're looking for on a given project. The point of Contexts is that there are some things you can only do in a certain environment (run an errand, make a phone call), and you can do any of your categories in any environment (presumably). If category is important for you to note, you could color all projects under Family light brown, etc.
You also simply must start using the GMail Macros Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, if you're not. With the number of emails I'm sure you have each day, an extra keyboard shortcut or two would save you significant time.
Don't beat yourself up over the "don't check email too many times per day" idea. That may be fine for people whose livelihoods don't depend on the Internet, but it's damn irresponsible to check email once or twice a day when your career is web-based. The key is not to *dwell* in your Inbox all day -- you want to hit a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and be in and out in a minute or two.
Geoff Manning
· 1 year ago
Hi Chris, great post. I have been trying to stay at inbox zero ever since the Merlin Mann Google presentation (re) circulated twitter a month or so ago. It's been going well so far (for my personal email atleast!)
I use Google Calendar to process emails that are date sensitive, either reminders or events/meetings. With G Cal, if the date is formatted properly, you can add the event straight from the email.
I get way too many emails from work to try this yet. Perhpas if I can stick to this discipline for personal email, I can apply it to work...eventually.
Denzuko
· 1 year ago
Smashing tip mate. And considering that i get about an infinitesimal amount of email a day let alone on the hour this is quit helpful. Now only if we can do this with our free yahoo and hotmail accounts too. But on second hand, that's why we all have switch to google anyways.
ryan
· 1 year ago
Well articulated...thanks for the post and it's a big help. A few years ago a team of us tried the extreme approach - we erased every email that came in for one week without looking at it as a test. We then tested to see how much fell through the cracks. In the end, there were about 5 important things that fell through the cracks but since we received phone calls about those issues we were able to handle anyway. Now, I don't suggest this approach for a whole host of reasons and we haven't done anything like it since - rather I just point it out because....you must be very diligent in asking "is this important/do I need to respond/do I need to be copied on all of this/etc...". Organization of email is great and this post help immensely with that, but it's also important to cut down on the amount of incoming email in the first place.
Steve Ellwood
· 1 year ago
Chris, I already take your RSS feed, and benefit from it. I've just twittered this to some colleagues who are crumbling under the wieght of their inboxes. Seeing your mail on one page really makes a difference.
Stever Robbins
· 1 year ago
Hi, Chris,
I like your e-mail system. If you'd like to add a powerful tweak, check out the book "Do It Tomorrow" by Mark Forster. Mark advocates scanning your e-mail several times, but only to take action on things that REQUIRE immediate response. Everything else, you defer dealing until tomorrow. Tomorrow, you limit your action time to processing the (fixed size) inbox from yesterday. Each day you get the experience of emptying your inbox and completing your TO DO list. It's very powerful!
Best wishes,
Stever Robbins host of The Get-It-Done Guy
chrisbrogan
· 1 year ago
Wow. Gush gush. Stever commented on my post??? (honestly, I'm a big fan, and you need to be, too.)
Loopue
· 1 year ago
Check out http://diggreponsitory.blogspot.com/2007/12/spa... - Gmail is still liable for spam attacks unless you do a little patchwork with filters and labels to remove spam. GMail still hasn't rectified the problem, but you can fix it yourself with a little elbow grease.
Chris Baker
· 1 year ago
I like this! I'm constantly trying to keep the inbox down. When it's at or below 5 I feel free and creative. Thanks for the ideas!!
Sarah Atwood
· 1 year ago
Dang, Brogan. I'm just as overwhelmed by this post as I am with my inbox but I like what your saying. I think I need to keep reading it over and over and eventually I will have the strength to put it to use. :)
chrisbrogan
· 1 year ago
@Sarah - You'll get there. Baby steps. Read Stever's idea and the other people in the comments. They have even easier methods. : )
Casey McKinnon
· 1 year ago
OMG!!! I did it!!! Thank you, Chris Brogan! You have saved my inbox! I can breathe now...
chrisbrogan
· 1 year ago
By the way, Casey McKinnon put a Flickr screencap of her empty inbox with a link to this post. That link got me 40 new reads of the post. That's just something to consider when you're posting to Flickr. Another source of traffic.
Frank Carver
· 1 year ago
There seems to be a step missing in your description. I don't really understand how you get from categorizing email (which I do already) to what is shown in the image. Gmail puts every mail I have ever received into my inbox, even if I have read it and tagged it with labels. Is this picture meant to indicate that you have deleted all your email - if so, how can you refer back to it? I thought the point of gmail is that it keeps everything and makes it searchable.
In other, traditional, email clients, I can move stuff from the inbox to folders to get it out of my face, but gmail does not seem to support that way of working. I can't even find a way of displaying only un-labelled conversations (which would seem to be the equivalent of a traditional inbox).
Or have I missed something obvious? Baffled.
Casey McKinnon
· 1 year ago
And looking at my Flickr stats on the screencap of my empty inbox (which has currently been seen 350 times):
32% of traffic came from Pownce 24% of traffic came from Flickr 14% of traffic came from Twitter
Another thing to consider ;)
chrisbrogan
· 1 year ago
Hi Frank--
I don't use folders. I pile all the mail in an archive, because if there was data I really needed to complete a task or to know something, I move that into Things. The mail just stays in an archive.
The point is to make the mail app NOT be where you think about things. It's where you receive info, and then do something with the info. Save the mail for reference, just in case, but otherwise, you DO stuff elsewhere.
Make sense?
randulo
· 1 year ago
Chris, as an occasional correspondent, my suggestion would be to add a keyword or two that you tell people about and use Gmail's filters to file them. So for me, you can add "crackpot" and I'll send my ideas to you with that word in the subject. All my ideas will be filed under "crackpot". Perfect, no?
Sneakemail.com has the advantage that each address can be turned off or deleted if you find yourself spammed to death. I use Sneakemail for all forms and memberships, at least until I'm sure the company won't sell my email into spam slavery.
/r
Frank Carver
· 1 year ago
Thanks Chris.
I have experimented a bit more, and I think I have found my problem. I was misunderstanding what "archive" meant. In GMail, it seems that "archive" just means "do not show in inbox". This is very different from what (for example) Outlook means by "archive". Having been very frustrated by Outlook's approach to archiving (which makes archived email much harder to access) in the past, I had never clicked that button in GMail.
A clarification of your article might be to elaborate on your section on processing incoming mail. How/when do you archive your email. Do you have a rule which archives everytyhing automatically to keep your inbox empty? Do you do it manually after you have labelled an email as "Family/Home", "Blogging" etc.? Do you use some other approach? I found it puzzling that you include the archive button in "You’ll Need", but then never mention it again.
As an aside, what do you do about incoming email which does not have an obvious associated action - such as discussion mailing lists, automated status updates or subscriber newsletters?
randulo
· 1 year ago
"As an aside, what do you do about incoming email which does not have an obvious associated action - such as discussion mailing lists, automated status updates or subscriber newsletters?"
What I do is filter them by server of origin and file by subject. Looking at Gmail "folders" you'll see the number of undread messages, and you'll look when you're in the mood to read about each interest, e.g., design, aero, exercise or Cubs.
/r
randulo
· 1 year ago
heh, "undread" messages! I meant "unread", but non-spam which is often called "ham" could be in the "undread" category :)
E.T.Cook
· 1 year ago
You aren't that specific about how you transfer the messages and "mail" tasks to Things if you use Gmail. If you use mail, I know you can drag the message into a context or project, but how do you integrate gmail into the fold with Things?
Tashjian - Webshop
· 1 year ago
Thanks for the post. A couple of other points to consider to not to give out your primary email address to everyone. And if you work for a company ask management to constantly remind everyone not to "Send to all" unless it's truly necessary.
chrisbrogan
· 1 year ago
@E.T. - I don't, exactly. I do some copy/paste if I need details, but otherwise, I just transfer it up and over. Portage style.
@Tashjian - good point about not sending to all. Phew.
kaneiet
· 1 year ago
es tu vins vina vini!
Karen
· 1 year ago
Re: Frank Carver's comment 3/22. "Having been very frustrated by Outlook’s approach to archiving (which makes archived email much harder to access) in the past, I had never clicked that button in GMail."
If there's anyone out there who still hasn't figured this out, nevernevernever let Outlook auto-archive your e-mail. If you want to archive messages (say, your employer's IT department has a limit on how much you can store in your Mailbox), create a personal fold (.pst) and manually drag & drop to it.
That's not always efficient, but at least you'll be able to find what you archived--and if you can't, what's the point? This works best if you collect all messages related to a project in one folder (as suggested in Chris's article) and then move the folder to the archive after the project is complete. Manually. (Did I say that already?)
OK, some would say the better approach might be to skip Outlook in the first place (although I like it better than most Microsoft products), but if you're using it this is the way to go.
JudiFree
· 1 year ago
I just got to ZERO! Thanks for the inspiration. Now, let's see if I can keep it there.
MikeR
· 1 year ago
I started today and I can see a light at the end of the tunnel. Here's my method:
Open Outlook every two hours. Process emails: -Tasks/Projects go into TaskCoach (which now supports dragging and dropping an email to create a new task) -FYIs, Thank You's, most CC:s get read and deleted -Anything I TRULY think I might need later for CYA or for reference gets archived in a big archive folder that I'll search when needed using Copernic. -Delete everything else with extreme prejudice
I let my coworkers and boss know what I was doing and why so they could understand why I wasn't treating Outlook like an IM client as our team has done in the past. So far so good!
Carissa Thorp
· 1 year ago
I'm using Gmail and Things too. They work great together, especially with the following tips:
Each item in gmail has a unique address; just choose the New Window link in the top right hand corner. You can drag any link to Things and it will create a new To Do item with a direct link to the email in the Notes section.
If you're using Firefox, the add-on QuoteURLText will copy any text you select and the url with one click, ready for pasting into Things.
The only problem at the moment is that Things doesn't recognise https (encrypted connection) links and make them clickable. I only use Gmail encrypted, so I have to select any url and choose "Make Link" in the context menu. Hopefully this will be fixed in coming versions.
Vidar Andersen
· 1 year ago
Great to see yet another one freed from the tyranny of E-Mail herding and procrastinating! :)
I've been an avid 'inbox zero' practitioner for a long time myself without knowing it. I've recently come to know about David Allen and Merlin Mann and their great contributions to Getting Things Done.
I guess what makes my 'methodology' a bit different is that I do not label or differentiate my mails - and I use my inbox as a list of my current to-dos. I find it much more efficient for me personally.
With the advent of GMail, handling my mail has gotten ridiculously easy. Just achive and forget - search when needed. I cannot imagining going back to herding my mail ever again.
On another note to fellow Europeans, remember to verify that your devices have been successfully adjusted +1 hours after midnight today, as Daylight Saving Time (DST) ends. ;)
houstonhotdeals
· 1 year ago
great article
asda
· 1 year ago
tasutavideod.kilu.de
Marsha Egan
· 1 year ago
Great post, Chris, and congratulations. Alot of this is about knowing yourself, and taking control!
One of the things that helps me the most is to go into the inbox with the intention of SORTING frather than WORKING. If anything requires action, I have an Action A folder (for the important stuff)and and Action B folder (for the less important stuff.) This is ONLY where I keep it. Like you, I set a diary for anything that is time sensitive... but the cool thing is now I know exactly where to go to get it. You can flag things to denote family, blog ideas, etc., and search and sort them that way too.
Then, this all comes together when we plan our days, once a day. That's when we check our diaries, the Action folders, the phone calls we must return, the meetings, etc... This was featured in my 12 Steps that went 'round the world in February 2007, and alot of folks thought it worked well.
John Kellden
· 1 year ago
Great post, thanks Chris. I tag every single incoming email, and then I just leave them be. If there's something I need to attend to later the same day, I mark those un-read. If there are others that I want to get back to, but can't do that same day, I put a star on them. By having the most important, most urgent email marked as *unread*, they show up at the bottom right corner, in the Firefox addon Gmail Manager. It's a godsend. There they sit and gently work their *unread* charm in my peripheral vision, until I've worked up enough guilt to go ahead and just do it. Answer. Reply. Or somesuch.
Sandra @ Guiding Vision
· 1 year ago
Great post and comments. I guess I don't get the reason for the additional step of using Things. I've been using Outlook for years and recently moved to Thunderbird but don't like it much better. I think I'll try Gmail and just use a combination of labels, the archive button and star items that need action.
Chris
· 3 months ago
I'm interested in finding out if your workflow has improved over the past year. I've been migrating away from email as much as possible and your article was an impetus for me to purchase Things and give it a try.
I used Things for a few weeks and was loving it, but like you said, you have to focus on using it. After a while, e-mails would pour in and I would have to sort through every one to delete or archive. I began feeling overwhelmed with email, client requests and projects. I personally hate email now and would like to never have to use it again, but there is always the problem of clients requiring it.
All Comments
It sounds like there's no clear differentiation between supporting project materials and actionable "later" emails that you haven't yet input into Things.
Whenever an email requires an action, I hit 's' for star, and then go through my starred items regularly and input them into my project management system (pen and paper ... haven't met a software program that's worked for me yet, and I'm a strong believer that your process has to be there first, and then a program may or may not be available to fit that process). Once the action has been captured, I un-star (but it maintains the project label throughout).
It also might be easier to name your labels after the project name and not the area. This makes it really easy to find only exactly what you're looking for on a given project. The point of Contexts is that there are some things you can only do in a certain environment (run an errand, make a phone call), and you can do any of your categories in any environment (presumably). If category is important for you to note, you could color all projects under Family light brown, etc.
You also simply must start using the GMail Macros Greasemonkey extension for Firefox, if you're not. With the number of emails I'm sure you have each day, an extra keyboard shortcut or two would save you significant time.
Don't beat yourself up over the "don't check email too many times per day" idea. That may be fine for people whose livelihoods don't depend on the Internet, but it's damn irresponsible to check email once or twice a day when your career is web-based. The key is not to *dwell* in your Inbox all day -- you want to hit a bunch of keyboard shortcuts and be in and out in a minute or two.
I use Google Calendar to process emails that are date sensitive, either reminders or events/meetings. With G Cal, if the date is formatted properly, you can add the event straight from the email.
I also use Remember the Milk for storing to-do's by context. There is a method for keeping RTM in the sidebar for Firefox here so it is always available.
I get way too many emails from work to try this yet. Perhpas if I can stick to this discipline for personal email, I can apply it to work...eventually.
I like your e-mail system. If you'd like to add a powerful tweak, check out the book "Do It Tomorrow" by Mark Forster. Mark advocates scanning your e-mail several times, but only to take action on things that REQUIRE immediate response. Everything else, you defer dealing until tomorrow. Tomorrow, you limit your action time to processing the (fixed size) inbox from yesterday. Each day you get the experience of emptying your inbox and completing your TO DO list. It's very powerful!
Best wishes,
Stever Robbins
host of The Get-It-Done Guy
In other, traditional, email clients, I can move stuff from the inbox to folders to get it out of my face, but gmail does not seem to support that way of working. I can't even find a way of displaying only un-labelled conversations (which would seem to be the equivalent of a traditional inbox).
Or have I missed something obvious? Baffled.
32% of traffic came from Pownce
24% of traffic came from Flickr
14% of traffic came from Twitter
Another thing to consider ;)
I don't use folders. I pile all the mail in an archive, because if there was data I really needed to complete a task or to know something, I move that into Things. The mail just stays in an archive.
The point is to make the mail app NOT be where you think about things. It's where you receive info, and then do something with the info. Save the mail for reference, just in case, but otherwise, you DO stuff elsewhere.
Make sense?
Sneakemail.com has the advantage that each address can be turned off or deleted if you find yourself spammed to death. I use Sneakemail for all forms and memberships, at least until I'm sure the company won't sell my email into spam slavery.
/r
I have experimented a bit more, and I think I have found my problem. I was misunderstanding what "archive" meant. In GMail, it seems that "archive" just means "do not show in inbox". This is very different from what (for example) Outlook means by "archive". Having been very frustrated by Outlook's approach to archiving (which makes archived email much harder to access) in the past, I had never clicked that button in GMail.
A clarification of your article might be to elaborate on your section on processing incoming mail. How/when do you archive your email. Do you have a rule which archives everytyhing automatically to keep your inbox empty? Do you do it manually after you have labelled an email as "Family/Home", "Blogging" etc.? Do you use some other approach? I found it puzzling that you include the archive button in "You’ll Need", but then never mention it again.
As an aside, what do you do about incoming email which does not have an obvious associated action - such as discussion mailing lists, automated status updates or subscriber newsletters?
What I do is filter them by server of origin and file by subject. Looking at Gmail "folders" you'll see the number of undread messages, and you'll look when you're in the mood to read about each interest, e.g., design, aero, exercise or Cubs.
/r
@Tashjian - good point about not sending to all. Phew.
"Having been very frustrated by Outlook’s approach to archiving (which makes archived email much harder to access) in the past, I had never clicked that button in GMail."
If there's anyone out there who still hasn't figured this out, nevernevernever let Outlook auto-archive your e-mail. If you want to archive messages (say, your employer's IT department has a limit on how much you can store in your Mailbox), create a personal fold (.pst) and manually drag & drop to it.
That's not always efficient, but at least you'll be able to find what you archived--and if you can't, what's the point? This works best if you collect all messages related to a project in one folder (as suggested in Chris's article) and then move the folder to the archive after the project is complete. Manually. (Did I say that already?)
OK, some would say the better approach might be to skip Outlook in the first place (although I like it better than most Microsoft products), but if you're using it this is the way to go.
Open Outlook every two hours.
Process emails:
-Tasks/Projects go into TaskCoach (which now supports dragging and dropping an email to create a new task)
-FYIs, Thank You's, most CC:s get read and deleted
-Anything I TRULY think I might need later for CYA or for reference gets archived in a big archive folder that I'll search when needed using Copernic.
-Delete everything else with extreme prejudice
I let my coworkers and boss know what I was doing and why so they could understand why I wasn't treating Outlook like an IM client as our team has done in the past. So far so good!
Each item in gmail has a unique address; just choose the New Window link in the top right hand corner. You can drag any link to Things and it will create a new To Do item with a direct link to the email in the Notes section.
If you're using Firefox, the add-on QuoteURLText will copy any text you select and the url with one click, ready for pasting into Things.
The only problem at the moment is that Things doesn't recognise https (encrypted connection) links and make them clickable. I only use Gmail encrypted, so I have to select any url and choose "Make Link" in the context menu. Hopefully this will be fixed in coming versions.
I've been an avid 'inbox zero' practitioner for a long time myself without knowing it. I've recently come to know about David Allen and Merlin Mann and their great contributions to Getting Things Done.
I guess what makes my 'methodology' a bit different is that I do not label or differentiate my mails - and I use my inbox as a list of my current to-dos. I find it much more efficient for me personally.
I pulled off an attempt to describe what I do to get things done on my blog not so terribly long ago:
http://stopmebeforeiblogagain.com/are-we-gettin...
With the advent of GMail, handling my mail has gotten ridiculously easy. Just achive and forget - search when needed. I cannot imagining going back to herding my mail ever again.
I also recommend the GMail BlackBerry app for getting things done when on the move:
http://www.google.com/a/help/intl/en/users/mobi...
On another note to fellow Europeans, remember to verify that your devices have been successfully adjusted +1 hours after midnight today, as Daylight Saving Time (DST) ends. ;)
One of the things that helps me the most is to go into the inbox with the intention of SORTING frather than WORKING. If anything requires action, I have an Action A folder (for the important stuff)and and Action B folder (for the less important stuff.) This is ONLY where I keep it. Like you, I set a diary for anything that is time sensitive... but the cool thing is now I know exactly where to go to get it. You can flag things to denote family, blog ideas, etc., and search and sort them that way too.
Then, this all comes together when we plan our days, once a day. That's when we check our diaries, the Action folders, the phone calls we must return, the meetings, etc... This was featured in my 12 Steps that went 'round the world in February 2007, and alot of folks thought it worked well.
There they sit and gently work their *unread* charm in my peripheral vision, until I've worked up enough guilt to go ahead and just do it. Answer. Reply. Or somesuch.
I used Things for a few weeks and was loving it, but like you said, you have to focus on using it. After a while, e-mails would pour in and I would have to sort through every one to delete or archive. I began feeling overwhelmed with email, client requests and projects. I personally hate email now and would like to never have to use it again, but there is always the problem of clients requiring it.
http://gelderman.org/blog/2008/03/28/doing-some... with more links to inbox-zero articles.