Genuine Curiosity

Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.

 

Getting your Inbox to Empty: Dealing with the first email purge

In Part Two of David Allen's book Getting Things Done, there is a lot of fabulous information about how to process your inbox. While I found it valuable and it worked perfectly for my stacks o' stuff, I tweaked the process a bit to deal with my email inbox.

When I started GTD about 18 months ago, I had around 8000 emails in my inbox, about 2500 of which were unread. At the time, I ran my company's IT department, which was the only way I could get away with having that much stuff in my inbox (I raised my storage quota on the mail server - not a best practice, by the way).

The "start at the top and deal with one item at a time" method was causing me to twitch, so I developed a different strategy. Here is what it looks like - if you're dealing with a big purge of email, I'm hoping some of the methods will help.

  1. Consider temporarily following a "one minute rule" for handling messages (instead of the "two minute rule" from the book)

  • During this process, I used the one minute rule for two reasons:
    • I had too many messages to afford myself that much time per message

    • I wasn't very good at judging two minutes, and ended up spending 5+ minutes on things I thought were going to be two minute actions

  1. Sort by sender, then...

  • Consider deleting:
    • Messages from people you don't know

    • Message from people who are no longer with the company

    • Newsletters you'll never read (be honest)

    • Messages from people who only send you lame jokes and hoaxes (you know who they are by now)

    • Messages from benevolent Nigerians or foreign national lotteries claiming to have money for you

  1. Sort by Subject / Topic / Conversation, then...

  • Delete:
    • Issues you don't care about

    • Outdated newsletters that are still there from the first pass

  • Delete or file:
    • Issues that have been resolved
      • Decide whether you need to file the whole thread or just the one with the conclusion

  • File things you want to retain for reference, like:
    • Interesting factoids that you want to retain for reference

    • Information for personnel files

    • Information pertinent to your job, goals, hobbies, etc.

    • Funny stuff

    • Praise and criticism (I file these under Kudos, with a subfolder for Antikudos)

    • References to useful resources

By following these methods, you should be able to quickly get rid of irrelevant messages, things you are unlikely to read, and already-processed stuff.

When you're filing, don't be shy - just throw things into a file in your email client that makes sense to you. In Outlook, you can hit ++V to quickly move the currently selected email into a file (and the dialog provides a button to create a new folder if you don't have a suitable one already). By the way, +D deletes a message -- try it out... a lot.

This process will leave you with a much shorter list of things to process, and you can then move to the more traditional "start at the top and deal with one item at a time" process outlined in the book.

Want to see the pot of gold at the end of the inbox? Click on the image at right. Got tips of your own? Please share them.

Next post, we'll deal with some ideas for setting up an email filing and archiving strategy for Outlook.

Another helpful hint:

Check out the GTD Outlook Add-In. It is now a part of my essential toolkit for helping me keep "In" empty. It includes a nice guide on GTD workflow with Outlook, and if you buy the current version you automatically get the forthcoming release that promises to add some nice new features.

There is a trial version available at the link above - why not give it a try?

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On the road with David Allen

This week, I was a part of  David Allen's seminar "GTD | The RoadMap" in San Jose, California.  In this session, there were over 140 people - all fellow travelers on the path to higher productivity with less stress. 

After my last post, I got an email a couple from my friend Phil Gerbyshak of "Make It Great!" asking what I thought of it, and what I came away with in terms of the value of the seminar.  I sent him a reply, but thought some of it was worth sharing here.

As you may know, the Getting Things Done books cover specific activities you can engage in to get your life in order, improve productivity, and "get things done."  As an adopter of the methodology, one of the challenges I've faced is making enough of the habits stick to realize ongoing benefits from the GTD process. 

"One of the biggest inhibitors to maintaining GTD is your addiction to stress.  Once the stress is gone, your subconscious sometimes does things to bring it back." 

The focus of this seminar is to ground (or re-ground) you in the basics of GTD, and it builds on this foundation to provide lots of additional color to help you personalize, adapt, and embed the methdology into your own work style.

Prior to the seminar, I was doing a lot of the right things with GTD and have been using it for about 18 months.  Although I have been realizing lots of benefits from this methodology, I felt like there was something missing. 

The seminar helped me realize where some of my gaps are and identify some actions to bring my productivity, focus, and clarity to the next level.  There is also the benefit of meeting others at the seminar that can act as a sort of support group to keep each other's activities 'on the rails' - and maintain a forum to share tips and tricks.

OK, so you've read the books - is the seminar worth attending? Short answer: Yes. 

I think it's a lot like golf - the only way to get better is to keep playing and work on your technique.  If you want to get *way* better, sometimes you need to buy a few sessions with a pro, who can help you fine-tune your game and smooth out the rough spots in your technique.  This seminar is just that - a session with a pro.

David also provides some guidance at the end of the day for making this stick once you get back to the hectic world of work.  No magic bullets, but there are some tricks to help you re-learn habits that are more effective and return to your 'zone' when you fall off the wagon.  This includes some voodoo using a paperclip that shows the power of belief and the impact of negative self-talk.

Over the next few days I'll share some other things I learned during this seminar.  You can also find some interesting perspective on this from Buzz Bruggeman who was in the row ahead of me taking notes on his PC.

Official definition of "GTD"

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Score two for Microsoft

see and hear lots of Microsoft bashing in my line of work (IT and software).  Like any successful company, some people will always love them and some people will always hate them.  That’s just the way it is.

I’ve had my share of frustrating experiences with Microsoft products, but I want to take a moment to share a couple of recent product experiences that are scoring points with me.

Microsoft Anti-Spyware Beta

I’m running Microsoft’s Anti-Spyware Beta, and have been doing so for about two months now.  After trying out a number of other anti-spyware products, I find that Microsoft’s product provides better detection and cleaning capabilities, operates in a less obtrusive manner, and generally offers me a better user experience.  I've tried running others after scanning my system with Microsoft's product and haven't found any nasties that've been missed by this Beta.

Microsoft also provides a number of useful accessories for cleaning up cookies, browser caches, and erasing browsing history.

This product came from Microsoft’s acquisition of a solid company called (ironically) Giant Software Company, and I’m very impressed with the direction they’re taking.  This one’s a keeper – and it’s free. [Note - I hope Microsoft is incorporating Giant's anti-spam technology into upcoming Outlook releases - Giant was very good when they were standalone.]

Microsoft Internet Explorer version 7 Beta

Judging from my hosting company's stats on which browsers hit this blog, if you're reading this you’re probably not using Internet Explorer (the vast majority of the browser hits to my site show up as Firefox or Mozilla).

I have been using Firefox and Maxthon as my browsers of choice (I regularly use several sites that are a pain in the butt to use on Firefox).

As part of my subscription to the Microsoft’s Developer Network, I decided to try their beta of Internet Explorer v7, and I’m pleasantly surprised.  They’ve added some good security features (on top of those already layered in with Windows XP Service Pack 2), and a number of other useful features.

The ones of most interest to me are:

  • Tabbed browsing
  • RSS support
  • Anti-phishing features that help expose bogus sites trying to scam me

OK, so Firefox has had tabbed browsing and RSS support for a while – please don’t kick me about that, as I have been a Firefox user for a while.  But I think Microsoft’s done a great job of implementing both of these features in version 7, and I’m starting to use their browser more and more often - even after my brief exposure to this new Beta version.

Why on Earth, you may ask, would I use this vilified company’s vilified browser?  Aside from the fact that I don't have some emotionally charged vendetta against them:

  • Some of the sites I need to use don't work right in Firefox (don't blame me - I didn't build them, but I need to use them).  It’s easier for me to use one browser for everything than it is to remember which sites work with Firefox and which ones don’t;
  • My reasons for not using IE are going away (I used Maxthon and Firefox because they supported tabbed browsing and RSS);
  • IE feels faster and “snappier” than Firefox based on some informal tests I’ve done

And this is just Beta 1 - I will continue to use this to see what's in store as they move to a final release.

Summary

These two Microsoft products are doing me right these days – especially when used together (the Anti-Spyware product guards against browser hijacking, and can roll back IE settings if they are tampered with for example).

When it comes to technology, I’m not looking for a religious battle – I just want something that works well, helps me get things done, and does it at a reasonable cost.  These tools hit the mark for me (and they’re free).

Oh, and just so you know, I am not – and never have never been – employed by Microsoft.

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Wiki, wiki. Smooth and sticky.

Just read Bren’s post on wikis and, as usual, it fit in well with discussions I’ve been having with customers recently (Bren and I tend to hear similar siren songs at the same time, it seems). 
I have been recommending the use of wikis for internal projects and cross-functional collaboration within IT operations teams, and had just read the same article Bren did on Lifehacker about using wikis for business.

If you are a wiki fan, check out Bren’s post for some good ideas on preventing obsolete or stale information.

If you are unfamiliar with what a “wiki” is, it’s a web-based platform for dynamic, open collaboration.  People can invent new topics, add to / mark up / correct other people’s topics, and do all sorts of cool things to share information.

Where I work, we use it for a lot of things, but the highest leverage we get is to share information about the software we create.  This includes everything from feature discussions, design collaboration, sharing of customer use cases, collecting information about products and platforms we integrate with, and a whole mess of other topics.

We also use it to track development cycles and product release status, so that everyone can have a unified view of the successes and challenges at every step of the way.  Pretty cool (and empowering) stuff.

As Bren mentions, wikis can seem pretty arcane (I sometimes hear descriptions like ugly, clunky, geeky, or Spartan).  When you first jump in, it can feel like the wild, wild west.  The goal of the wiki is not prettiness – it’s to offer an efficient, effective way of presenting, sharing, and interacting with information in a multi-user environment.

That said, wikis can be pretty, too. If you want to see some good examples of wiki done right, check out:
• Wikipedia
• GTD Wiki

If you're considering using a wiki for your business, PC Magazine has a great feature on "Working Together With Wikis" that is worth a read.

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