Tue, 20 Jun 2006
Stack for email
Had a very nice dinner with Rand and Alexis tonight (boy, they know how to feed a bachelor) and ended up talking with Rand about GTD a little bit. He made the suggestion that processing email as a stack is actually a faster way to go than treating it like a queue, especially if you have a mail reader that does threading. The basic idea is that while it is best to achieve Inbox Zero sometimes you need to build some momentum. Having the recent stuff first usually means you can destroy whole threads quickly and easily which builds up momentum for the stuff that’s been lingering around. In the worst case (which is simply the “didn’t make it to Inbox Zero” case), at least you’ve processed the most recent items (including the big rambling threads of doom, easily identified by their 5+ replies) which are usually the ones that are time critical.
I configured mutt to do this by putting this in my .muttrc:
set sort=threads
set aux_sort=reverse-last-date
which is handy. Obviously, GUI mail readers can do this with a simple click of the Date Recieved sort bar.