A while ago I blogged my first attempt to set up Apple Mail to work with David Allen’s “Getting Things Done” system.
Since then, I have read the book (always a good idea!) and discovered the fabulous kGTD — “Kinkless Getting Things Done” — a collection of applescripts and templates that turns OmniOutliner Pro and iCal into a very slick GTD tool.
kGTD is being improved at break-neck speed by the developer, Ethan Schoonover, who is pumping out new features and bugfixes almost daily with good humour and wit. Reading the RSS feed of comments by Ethan and other kGTD users is now a daily highlight.
Anyway, reading the book and using kGTD, I got some things done. Bugger me; it works!
I also did some thinking and tweaked my Mail.app set-up a little to capture the guiding principles of GTD better.
One important lesson for me has been learning not to use my inbox as a lazy way of storing emails without making GTD-esque decisions about what to do with them. Emails can fester away in the Inbox for a long time before anything is done about them. You think because you have read them, you’ve dealt with them or somehow automatically will.
So I modified my set-up a little. The Next Actions Smart Mailbox (for next actions and for things that I am currently waiting on) and the Tickler Mailbox (for things that I have marked as “deferred”) are still there, but I added two more: an Unread Inbox and and an Unread Lists (for Mailing list posts — mostly grazing material, stuff I don’t have to do anything about).
I am learning not to look in my inbox at all. I don’t need to. Everything thing at comes into my Mail.app accounts turns up in one of the Unread mailboxes. All the work I need to do after processing the emails is contained in the Next Actions and Tickler mailboxes.
In fact, this system forces me to make a decision about each email when I first read it, because I know if I don’t tag it as something, it will fall out of the smart mailbox system and be lost for ever. (Unless I open up the Inbox and see it. But I’m not going to do that!)
Over the weekend, I’ll blog up how I tweaked my Mail Act-on and MailTags arrangement to make it work smarter for me.
I was highly skeptical of GTD when I first encountered it, as I tend to be about all Management-speak.
I’m not a true-believer yet, but I’d call myself a fellow-traveller. The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and I am getting things done and feeling more relaxed. Sweet!
Tags:
Apple Mail,
applescripts,
gtd,
kgtd,
mail.app
Related posts