My Getting Things Done experience
It has been already a couple of months since I read the book Getting Things Done from David Allen and started using his methodology for dealing with email (only using there but I live in Outllook so just improving how I deal with email can go a long way into making me more productive) including their Outlook Plugin. The results, the methodology is good but the plugin sucks. Let me be more specific:
- The GTD method of how to deal with incomign email (discard, deal with it if you can do it quickly, put it in a project, delegate, etc.) is perfect and I think that intuitively, I was sort of already doing that but now I do it in a more structure and organize way. You have to come up with your own refinments of the process since folllowing the exact way as it is describe in the book might not work for everyone (for instance, the adivce of dealing with every email that takes less than 2 minutes to deal with does not work for me since sometime I only have one hour to deal with 50 emails and if I spend 2 minutes in many of them I cannot read all of them).
- Moving things out of the inbox as soon as you can and organizing things in few folders (projects folders, someday folder, etc.) is a good idea. I was actually doing the opposite which was keeping everything in the inbox and once in a while trying to organize things in tons of folders. The main reaons in the past for doing this was that Outlook search was really slow and then having lots of folders neatly organize was a very good way to find emails. Now I have MSN Desktop (yes, I do not use Google Desktop, it is fast but the interface, the search options and the usability suck compared to MSN Desktop, I am still using Google for Web searches, there MSN has a long way to go) so the search issue is gone. The other problem with my old method was that I ended up getting so much email and have so little time, that most of the email will stay in the inbox and never get organized into folders. Since moving to the GTD methodology, I have reduced the amount of emails in my inbox from more than 10,000 to under 250 and I use the inbox as the periodic review list that is recommended on the book. A side advantage of this is now Outlook works way faster than in the past since Outlook does not seem to scale very well when you have very large inboxes (mine is close to 3GB) or large folders.
- The plugin sucks, it is clearly not designed for the latest version of Outlook, it does not work well when setting up projects or tasks and it slow. Moreover, it does not greatly reduce the number of clicks that I need to do with Outlook (I am using 2003) to acomplish the same task. I can see the value of having a better designed plugin to folllow the GTD methodology but the current version is not worth the price. Using flags and just simple drag and drops for moving emails to folders or to create tasks out of email do a good enough job.
My recommendation? Get the book, read it and understanding it and come up with your own custom GTD version and do not spend any money on the plugin. So Jim, I am ditching the delegate button but I am still forwarding you emails....
CD
Hola amigo! I might have to read this book as I too have hundreds of emails per day and have tried various systems for organising and prioritising them in terms of response.
The main thing is that I think Outlook as an email client is f*cking terrible (I find Outlook Express and Thunderbird are much better for searching and archiving emails)but the contacts/diary and other associated tools make it difficult to live without.
Hope that you’re well dude – contact me if you come to London. H-J is here all the time and we meet up at least once a month.
Jonas
Hello old friend,
What I do is very simple.
I created rules with Outlook that allow selections like mails to me or just CC, then rules based upon the sender, size, specific words, etc..and to be honest, although I get around 300 a day I can handle it.
Love your pictures and the tatooh!
Henk-Jan
Hey,
I was facing the same problem all year long – more than 50-70 emails a day to sort through, another 50+ to send out. We manage a multi-national group so the stuff is pouring in literally ’round the clock. And the emails aren’t just quick things to reply to and be done with. Almost everyone is like a major ongoing issue.
I see the Inbox as a to-do list. If something doesn’t get filed away from Inbox, then it hasn’t been answered or dealt with and therefore stays in Inbox. Similarly, if something is in Inbox, then I will definitely answer it at some point (I tell all my collegues who stop me in the hallways screaming this and that information to me to just send me a quick email. It’s the only way they can guarantee I’ll answer…)
I started making project/issues folders immediately and once I answered something important from Inbox, I’d sort it in those folders, kind of like in GTD. This works very well, and is better than sorting via “sender” as I see many people doing.
Soon, however, I still couldn’t keep up with the Inbox list (couldn’t get on top of issues quickly enough), and was getting pretty depressed and teed off to see that damn inbox growing so much. So now once a week, if my Inbox is more than 30 emails long, I go ahead and file into the project folders, and I create an email to myself with a list of un-answered issues with reference to the project folders containing supporting emails. This way, my Inbox still carries a memo of all the unanswered to-do things, but it doesn’t look like the mountain of mails to sort through.
Ok, this works for a load of 50 emails/day. I don’t think this will work for the guys above receiving 300+/day (!). That’s insane.