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He said he frequently receives email requests and questions that are also distributed to the other 20 people on his team.

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read more »ĭuring the Q&A portion of my Inbox Zero presentation at Google the other day, an audience member stumped me with a question about how to manage action around mailing list distributions (the question starts at about 48:22). If that's working for you, by all means, keep fiddling and filing.īut, if you're ready to admit you might be turning a crank that's potentially not hooked-up to anything, here's my four favorite ways to leverage the intelligence of Mail.app for drop-dead simple archiving. In addition to helping explode the myth that most email messages have any life once their actions have been liberated, it's a healthy habit to actively remove any unnecessary systematic fiddling that doesn't handsomely pay back the effort that habitually goes into it.Īnd, as ever: yes, some of you - because of the incredibly unique nature of your work in an office - will need to have 500 taxonomic mailboxes, a monthly archives by project, a person-by-person collection going back to 1983, and a multiply-copied CC'd team archives, coded by color and identified with helpful icons you found on Gopher in 1992. In fact, this kind of functional simplicity is something I've started to think of as a pillar of Inbox Zero. read more »įor some time now, I've encouraged people to consider abandoning the byzantine folder structure that most of us used to employ to 'organize' our email. It's called ' Clippings,' and if you're familiar with the similar feature in OmniOutliner, you can imagine how it might work in the context of a task-tracking app and the complementary apps whose contents you want to direct to it.Īlongside the recently-added Perspectives, this is a feature that is making me very happy right now. Well, I'm happy to say that recent sneaky peaks of OmniFocus now have a pretty neat way to help with this problem. But it's also advice that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads: 'OK, big shot, so where do I put this new task, and how exactly is it supposed to get there?' In fact, liberating actions from the email in which they arrived and putting them into a system that you trust is arguably the most important tenet of Inbox Zero.

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You could be forgiven for being exhausted by my harangues about the importance of putting actions into their own special place outside of email, web sites, or other action-bearing media ('Email is just a series of tubes,' Senator Ted Stevens, might one day say). While I think stuff like ubiquitous capture, the Natural Planning Model, the Two-Minute Rule, and many other bits are arguably as important, these are the three things that I feel have the biggest impact on how people's results change over time. Accepting that the heart of the Trusted System that lets you move through a day with a high tolerance for ambiguity is the knowledge that eventually everything you're doing gets looked at once a week without fail. Knowing that you don't need to track everything you could conceivably do about a Project you just need to know the next physical action that would get you closer to completion. Or as I like to put it, 'How will I know when I'm done with this?'

Articulating in the most specific terms possible what a successful outcome looks like for any given use of your time. When asked to distill everything down to its most powerful concepts, I came up with three, and here's how I'd summarize each: We started talking about which parts of David Allen's GTD system appear to have the greatest long-term impact on the people who have adopted it and who ultimately stick with it for years. The other day, I was talking with someone who is trying to encourage a Getting Things Done-like work approach amongst the people on his team.

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