Merlin Mann's "inbox zero" video is an excellent watch for anyone who has struggled with an overflowing email inbox and tried various things to cope with it. He has a GTD-inspired approach that likely works very well once you get yourself into a habit of following it religiously.
While I highly recommend watching the entire hour long video to get the excellent Q&A and more of his philosophy, the basic approach is simple: always empty your inbox. Figure out which actions you can apply to email and just do it.
His list is quite simple:
- Delete: just get rid of it (or archive it)
- Delegate: get someone else to deal with it
- Respond: if it takes just a few minutes, do it right now
- Defer: put it on a todo list, archive it, and deal with it later
- Do: handle whatever the email actually needs you to do
Of course, the key piece if the discipline. No system in the world works well without it. But having a framework is an excellent start. And Merlin is an excellent presenter.
Posted by jzawodn at August 02, 2007 03:23 PM
My list is a bit shorter:
Archive and forget.
Respond.
Delete.
This is a lot like some advice I got from a coworker at yahoo, when you get a new task you should go through the four D's, in this order:
Drop
Delay
Delegate
Do
Do it like an in basket on your desk
TRAF
Touch
Read
Act
File
Nothing should work it's way back to the top of the pile.
I'm on week 2 of zero inbox and holding steady! Using the GTD software plugin for outlook, which has a bit of a learning curve but works quite well if you're using Outlook as your primary mail/calendar/PIM client.
My 2 cents on the action items are that: it's easy to identify the deletes and quick actions (though you have to focus to stay in that mindset); it's easy enough to do the delegates but hard to keep track of the "waiting fors" without a good system; and harder to manage multiple groups / priorities / scopes of the larger-than-immediate to-dos, so focusing on processing them into direct next steps grouped into contexts is most helpful.
Funny thing. About 476 years ago (web time) Texas Intruments made me take a personal organization course. This predates the email inbox, we had real inboxes with paper in them!
We were advised to pick up each item and either deal with it or throw it away. No Second chances, no second looks.
Some things never change,
Ted Z
Sounds like David Allen's recycled advice from "Getting Things Done". However, Merlin's spin with personal stories makes it interesting to hear again.
Jeremy,
I saw this post back when you made it in '07. Just curious if you actually tried it? If so how's it working out for you? Still doing things GTD style?
--ken
