Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part II
A second installment. Learning to give up my Inbox and live in smart mailboxes instead was Part One.
Part Two is about the book and about how I’ve since modified my Mail Act-on and MailTags set-up to help me get some things done better than on my first attempt. (All of which you will find after the jump… )
First, actually reading the “Getting Things Done” book was a good idea.
These kinds of management/personal/life transformation/success schemes often have two or three good ideas that you can rip out of them without getting too involved. But in this case I was glad I took the trouble.
You can find the skeleton of the
There is a danger with reading the book though. When you stumble across statements like
You can ignore the physical world and its realities and trust in the universe. I did that and it was a powerful experience
it is tempting to stop and think, “What does that actually mean?” What is the universe apart from the physical world and its realities? What are the realities of the physicalworld in the first place?
Or this kind of thing pops up:
Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do both of them at the same time
and straight-away you are asking yourself, what are the assumptions about human beings that underpin this system — what kind of person finds that really a personal failure? Is the metaphor of the mind as a personal computer actually a compelling one?
That’s a trap. The point of Getting Things Done is getting things done; that is the results it generates, not the system itself. Press on and make it work for you. Go somewhere else for metaphysics and piercing analysis of the postmodern condition.
With this firm “results not dogma” mindset, I returned to my original attempt to make
Everything is either binned, deferred, filed, done on the spot, delegated or is marked for next action on its first logical task.
Apart from doing things that take less than two minutes and then archiving the message, every email that comes through my smart mailbox system suffers one of five fates.
Either it is deleted on the spot using the old-fashioned delete key, or I use
The Action rule applies a MailTags keyword (Action) and changes the email’s colour in the Viewer window to red.
The Waiting For rule applies a
Sometime applies a MailTags keyword (Sometime) and changes the colour of the email to grey.
File simply moves the message to the Archive folder on my IMAP server. With
After the triage, everything I still need to do appears in one of the smart mailboxes. Nothing else does.
A recurring task in
It’s not canonical GTD. But it is working well for me, and that’s the main thing. I still get context confusion but not as badly and that’s a small price to pay for the benefits.
Similar Posts:
- GTD Tickler file: Another approach with MailTags
- MailTags: Hyperlink to emails in other apps
- Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part I
- Getting Things Done with Mail and iCal
- Tabbable MailTags: Another improvement?
Tags: 43Folders, Apple Mail, Apple Mail Tips, gtd, iCal, kgtd, mail act-on, mail.app, mailtags, Productivity
November 21st, 2005 at 7:18 pm
I just switched to a Mac after being a hardcore Windows user for years. I like Mail, but it does one thing that makes me nuts. I have my compose settings for Rich Text Format but whenever I go to type a new message, it’s always in plain text.
Any insight would be greatly appreciated.
November 29th, 2005 at 6:44 am
Shizgirl,
This was written about somewhere else. Usually people appreciate plain text emails … :-) If Mail is sending your messages in plain text, you’re obviously not putting any formatted text in them. If you insist on sending them as rich text, just put some formatted text in your signature — it could be a single period, colored white!
November 29th, 2005 at 8:56 am
Marc and Shizgirl,
I think that the fix for plain text sending that Marc is talking about is this one, but I am not convinced that this is Shizgirl’s problem.
I think it is some kind of composing problem not a sending problem. When you say that it is always in plain text, what do you mean? Do you mean that you can’t bold text in the Compose window or what?
December 1st, 2005 at 12:28 pm
[...] I don’t have a secretary. In my earlier postings on trying to run GTD in Apple Mail, I simply created a mailbox that I called a ‘Tickler file’ in which Mail Act-on dumped all my “deferred” things, but I had to remember to sort them through manually at the start of every week. But no more! [...]
December 2nd, 2005 at 9:20 am
[...] Somewhere between the full, ‘classical’ GTD Tickler file using Zak Greant’s Applescript and my original, ‘dump-it-all-in-and-sort-it-out-later’ approach, comes this idea from Roger Eberhart. I figured out a much simpler system using a SmartMailbox and MailTags. The SmartMailbox (I call mine @INBOX) is set to show unread or mail whose due date is “before 1 day from today”. [...]
December 31st, 2005 at 2:56 am
[...] Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part I and Part II. Blogging is often about being a magpie, picking shiny things out of the never-ending piles of other people’s posts. [...]
January 9th, 2006 at 8:45 am
[...] Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part I Got some things done in Apple Mail, Part II AppleScript to create and run a GTD “Tickler file” GTD Tickler file: Another approach with MailTags Transfer Mail.app emails to your kGTD Inbox [...]
November 17th, 2006 at 11:10 am
Do you still apply GTD methodology to your current work flow? Would you say that it’s a continual process? Did I spell continual correctly?
November 19th, 2006 at 8:52 am
mandaris — yes, I do, although I’m always tweaking it. I tell myself that it is a continual drive towards great methodological simplicity, but in truth it is probably just a result of what can realistically be achieved.