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.
Mon, 01 May 2006
Collect gets an A
I’ve told myself I’d not get into GTD navel gazing. However, since it seems to be the natural order of things, I’d best get on with it so that I can get into such glories as what I really think about my President and Linux rules, OMG PONIES!!!. Slightly more seriously, it made sense to evaluate my plan every so often; in this case, about 6 months.
Here’s the deal: I rock at the GTD collect step. I am the HPDA master. My email flow is solid. My inboxes are well used. I very well may p0wn the Allen himself at getting my thoughts onto paper and out of my head. I even manage to have my total number of inboxes down to a reasonable number (5).
After the collect step, though, things get worse. Much worse. This isn’t the end of the world; after all, in a linear system you’re better off being better at the earlier parts than the later parts. I think that it’s time to focus some energy of the next part: processing. I suck at it. I don’t think I’ve ever actually sat down and asked “Is this actionable? What’s the next action?”. I usually dump things onto my project lists and hope that I’ll figure it out later when I review. This is phenomenally stupid; the whole point of processing is to take care of things up front.
I think that part of the problem is that I don’t do processing as a separate task. I should be treating it as a task in its own right to be done mindfully and in isolation. After all, if I don’t have the time to process stuff that I’ve collected, I certainly don’t have time to do anything with the results.