Getting Things Done - context dizziness
Over the weekend, I set up Apple Mail’s Inbox so that I could experiment with “Getting Things Done”.
Today I tried to triage and work out of my Next Actions folder rather than the Inbox itself.
What did I notice? Mostly I noticed how odd it is not to be in the inbox of a particular account.
An inbox is more than a place to hold mail. It is a context; the account it belongs to tells you what you should be doing. In your work account, you are doing one thing, in the personal account another thing and in the other accounts for other parts of your life, you are doing something else again.
In the Next Actions folder you are presented with a whole lot of tasks without the context. What part of me does this email for action belong to? What’s the appropriate tone for my response?
So I spent some of the day trying to learn to think by task not by role. And fighting the vertigo.
A passing phase, I’m sure, on the road to greater efficiency. And some of the dizziness is probably caused by this being the last week of semester with students wanting to share ever more inventive reasons for not handing in their essays.
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November 21st, 2005 at 12:06 am
[...] It’s not classic GTD. It’s leaner and more sparse. And the decision making options are reduced. But it is working well for me, and that’s the main thing. I still get context confusion but not as badly. And it is a small price to pay for the benefits. Technorati Tags: GTD, 43Folders, Apple Mail, Mail Act-on, MailTags, Mail.app, kGTD, iCal [...]