My Geekdom

Oh heck. I know it is the biggest craze to hit geeks since calculator watches but I'm getting on the bandwagon and getting hooked on GTD. I started it to help with my ever-growing office inbox. The problem there is that I get a lot of emails a day. As the number started to rise I found that my inbox was getting larger and larger and I had no way to go through and pull out the important & urgent mail from the important but not urgent mail from the unimportant (and probably never to be read) mail.

So, I started to using Outlook filters (we're all but forced to use Outlook at my office). At first I had the filters filed incoming messages into folders for archiving or deleting mail I was never going to read. This worked for a bit but as the quantity of email rose, it became harder and harder. So I started filtering the email I was going to read into multiple inboxes (inboxen? :-). The main inbox consisted of emails I didn't have a filter for, there were other folders that corresponded to important email (eg: emails marked high priority or emails from my boss). Others that tracked the current state of the build so I would know if a clean build could be expected. All of this helped but I found that some of my inboxes were growing without bound.

To deal with this, I incorporated Outlook auto-archiving. This is a very-nice feature of Outlook (to the best of my knowledge, it is the only mail client that supports this) that automatically empties out messages from a folder that are older than a certain age. After all, how interesting is a build mail from 2 months ago? Once again, things were better with the new addition but my incoming mail volume kept growing and problems kept arising.

I decided I needed a better filter system and evolved my filters from what I refer to as "basic filters" to "advanced filters". Basic filters have a condition and perform an action on emails that meet the condition. The key here is that the action is the last thing that needs to be done with the email before I read it, that is, they dispatch it. For example, "If (email from boss) move to Inbox-Important and stop processing the email". The advanced filters are a combination of two types of filters that I call "categorizers" and "dispatchers". Categorizers add "tags" (called categories in Outlook) to each email based on a condition. Then, after all of the categorizers have been run, the dispatchers execute. An example of a categorizer is "If (email from boss) add Important and Urgent tags". One dispatcher I had was "If (email has Important tag) move to Inbox-Important". Another rule was "If (email has Urgent tag) display in popup" (I always thought that answering my boss's emails ASAP was a key part of the SCP (Salary Continuation Plan)).

Alas, when my daily email count broke 150, even this failed. And by this time I was spending as much time maintaining the filters as I was saving on reading the email - I even took a brief bender into MS VBA programming to help the filters along. Somehow this just didn't seem worth it. So I decided to find a program to help me. I tried many (and still haven't purchased one). The first I found was Neo but this didn't seem to match my style (it is very good on filtering on people but not on subjects and such).

I then stumbled upon GTD. It has taken me a bit of time to understand the gist of it (I haven't read the book yet although I've ordered it from Amazon.com) but it is wonderful. It, like most brilliant ideas, seems incredibly simple once you hear it. The brilliance comes in being the first to say it in a simple, easy to remember manner. In GTD, what you do is categorize all incoming items (such as emails, voice mails, snail mail, things you remember your wife told you to do, etc...) into projects (some are office related projects like "Write presentation" while others are home related such as "Finish bathroom remodel like you promised the Mrs."). Projects are big things (see a wonderful article about this on 43Folders). Tasks (or Actions as they are called in GTD) are smaller, individual items that must be completed. Such as "Get presentation template from conference" or "Buy more grout for tiling". All of your incoming items should be dealt with in one of the following ways:

1. Handled quickly (the recommendation is 2 minutes or less)
2. Turned into a project or action
3. Deferred until a later time; either because it is not the most urgent task or because it cannot be handled until some dependencies are completed.
4. Assigned to another person to complete (although be careful assigning things to your boss - either at the office or at home - both can get you in the doghouse :-)
   

That's it. All explained. The inbox is always either being ignored (most of the day) or quickly handled. Time is spent going through your projects and completing the tasks. GTD has some clever ideas about prioritizing tasks within a project (not much, at least that I have found, for prioritizing time between projects) but the key is keeping that inbox empty and touching each inbox item only once.

Right now I'm tinkering with GTDGmail at home and Clear Context's Information Management System at the office (the latter is not a pure GTD tool but it does do a wonderful job of allowing operations on entire email threads as well as a pretty-good job at auto-prioritizing email). GTDGmail is free. Clear Context isn't (at least not the professional version - there is a free version) but is only $80 and the office will cover it). Both tools rely on integrating with existing features of their resident mailers including searching (GMail search and either Outlook search (slow) or Google Desktop Search (way faster)), archiving (labels and archiving in GMail and folders in Outlook), and a few other features.

Anyways, with or without a plugin, I'm hooked. GTD all the way for me. And I'm trying to see if I can find a tool to help my 11-yo son for using it. He has problems breaking big tasks into smaller ones and that is what GTD is best at (right now I'm investigating My Life Organized - I'll keep you informed).