Features

Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work

norbauer — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 20:33:05 -0500

The trite wisdom of contemporary folklore instructs us that the arrival of the New Year is a time to reflect on the achievements of the preceding 365 days and to bear down and “resolve” to achieve more in those to come. Over time, we learn what a hydra-headed beast this is: no matter how many projects or actions we may whack off our ineluctable lists, it seems that yet more (often increasingly ambitious) commitments spring up in their place. With each new year come self-recriminations for our failure to meet the unlikely goals we’ve set for ourselves—lose weight, read through those piles of books and RSS feeds, start picking up our socks—and a stultifying brainstorm of new projects we’d like to take on.

This New Year as I contemplate my resolutions, it’s the underlying concepts of achievement and productivity that are on my mind—and by extension the still grander issues of purpose and meaning in work. I invite you then, patient reader, on a desultory First Night journey with me as I take our mutual favorite hobby—the idle navel-gazing contemplation of productivity—to its most absurd yet logical conclusion: to ask whether eradicating the need for achievement itself might not be the key to happiness in work.

The Ticking Clock

I’ve always liked the lilting final words of James Joyce’s Ulysses, perhaps because they so aptly encapsulate my default stance toward the world—toward any new project or potential obligation that might amble my way—“yes I said yes I will Yes.” Although many toxic workplace cultures demand such an attitude, I am an enthusiastic yes-sayer by personal constitution and without coercion, and to this I probably owe a certain wide-ranging, if shallow, familiarity with the world, which I rather enjoy. But at the same time I am often burdened by a nagging awareness of all the grandiose things I intend to do and the inadequate time I have to do them. The ticking clock is always in my ear.

My lifelong preoccupation with accomplishment has always been not so much motivated by a desire for praise or reward as an anxiety about having some concrete achievements to which I can point and say, “look there, you cold and unfeeling universe: something I’ve done, something I’ve made, something I shall leave behind.” In this way, accomplishment has always been my answer to mortality—a subject to which I devote inordinate amount of thought. I’ve always felt that striving, however futilely—for perfection and transformative self-improvement—was the way to find happiness and purpose in this brutish and fleeting existence of ours.

Work is, after all, how we spend most of our waking lives. Thus if we are to take life-and-death seriously, we must take work and its goals seriously, and the same in reverse. The words of the beautiful Phil Ochs song (download) are apt here:

… I won’t be laughing at the lies when I’m gone
And I can’t question how or when or why when I’m gone
Can’t live proud enough to die when I’m gone
So I guess I’ll have to do it when I’m here.

Yet I’ve lately been wondering whether all this struggling against the inevitable through yes-saying, list-making, and project-contemplating isn’t in some ways contrary to my ultimate goal of finding some satisfaction “when I’m here.”

I was recently set to thinking about all this while reading a most extraordinary little tract by a man called Ray Bennet MD, which I stumbled upon in the most unlikely of places: the “stocking stuffer” bin at the middle-brow furniture retailer Restoration Hardware. The book is titled The Underachiever’s Manifesto: The Guide to Accomplishing Little and Feeling Great. Its genius lies in the fact that it does for self-help books what Woody Allen did for thrillers and musicals in Manhattan Murder Mystery and Everyone Says I Love You (respectively)—that is, to be the greatest send-up of a genre and simultaneously its greatest achievement. The central conceit of the slender volume (and, I suppose my central conceit here) might best be captured by the opening paragraph of its chapter on work:

Underachievers are the best, most dependable workers. This may seem counterintuitive but the key here is that while some achievement is necessary and good for productivity, a lot of it is dangerous to you and everyone around you. And if you have a wide enough perspective, you’ll see it’s also an exercise in futility.

The assumptions underlying this statement can be found among Bennet’s “Principles of Underachievement:”

Life’s too short.
Control is an illustion.
Expectations lead to misery.
Great expectations lead to great misery.
Achievement creates expectations.
The law of diminishing returns applies everywhere.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
The tallest blade of grass is the surest to be cut.
Accomplishment is in the eye of the beholder.

He extensively employs the language of pathology to describe what he calls the “dangerous addiction” to achievement, which he diagnoses as an ultimately fatal disease:

Consider: how many brilliant careers are coupled with disastrous marriages? How many talented, hardworking people smoke too much, exercise too little, or drink themselves into oblivion each week? At the other extreme, how many fitness-crazed or hyper-competitive individuals tear up their knees running marathons or risk life and limb scrambling to mountaintops? How many brilliant and ambitious people dream of winning accolades for their genius, only to wind up working for their C+ colleagues? And even if you do manage to just about maintain a full-sprint schedule of personal and professional achievement, it can take something as commonplace as the flu to throw your whole highly tuned enterprise stressfully out of whack. What you’ve never realized all these years is that it’s your commitment to excellence that is at the source of your trouble.

Which is an intriguing way of looking at it. Bennett’s ideas turn my longstanding notions about the need for achievement in the face of life’s brevity entirely on their head. And I’m increasingly inclined to buy his interpretation.

Futility and Insignificance

It is surely worth taking a few moments away from our quotidian busywork to step back and ask why we’re doing what we’re doing and whether doing it differently (or, more importantly, thinking about it differently) might improve the satisfaction we’re able to derive from our work and life. In his manifesto, Bennett is calling our attention to the ultimate futility and often self-defeating character of the human ambition to create, excel, and win, with the reasonable expectation that this might encourage us to calm down a bit and perhaps even phone it in from time to time.

He is certainly not the first to do this, nor should he be. The fundamental relationship between death and how we spend our time is the single most important issue with which a human must grapple. How are we to decide what to do on a day-to-day basis unless we have an answer to this problem firmly in our heads?

Ancient Greek religion provides us with the story of Sisyphus, the king who put Death in chains and in so doing freed humanity from mortality. This didn’t last long, alas, and the gods punished the king’s cunning by compelling him to an eternity pushing a rock up a hill that was condemned always to escape him and roll down to the bottom again, forcing him to begin his efforts anew. Sound familiar? Here’s David Allen:

How would you feel if your list and your stack were totally—and successfully—completed? You’d probably be bouncing off the ceiling, full of creative energy. Of course, within three days, guess what you’d have? Right—another list, and probably an even bigger one! You’d feel so good about finishing all your stuff you’d likely take on bigger, more ambitious things to do.

The unending struggle of Sisyphus is often used as a metaphor for the human condition, but some of us resemble it more than others—and we tend to be the ones with the more ambitious lists. Robert Burton, author in 1621 of the brilliant, sprawling Anatomy of Melancholy rightly lists this sort of ambition as one of the causes of the subject of his book, saying that those under its sway “may not cease, but as a dog in a wheel, a bird in a cage, or a squirrel in a chain…they climbe and climbe still, with much labour, but never make an end, never at the top.”

The essential point that we must confront here is that the achievements which seem so important and for the pursuit of which we perpetually torture ourselves are on the one hand futile and the other utterly insignificant. What is the ultimate summit we expect to reach? And if we can’t answer this question, why do we exert ourselves as if we’re heading towards one?

The eloquent everyman-philosopher Alain de Botton puts it this way:

The advantages of two thousand years of Western civilization are familiar enough: an extraordinary increase in wealth, in food supply, in scientific knowledge, in consumer goods, in physical security, in life expectancy and economic opportunity. What is perhaps less apparent and more perplexing is the way that such impressive material advances may have gone hand in hand with a rise in levels of status anxiety among ordinary Western citizens, by which is meant a rise in levels of concern about importance, achievement and income.

A sharp decline in actual deprivation may—paradoxically—have been accompanied by a continuing and even increased sense of deprivation and a fear of it. Populations blessed with riches and possibilities far outstripping those imaginable by their ancestors tilling the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe have shown a remarkable capacity to feel that both who they are and what they have are not enough.

De Botton continues for the rest of Status Anxiety to show that much of our concerns about achievement are extremely localized—relative to those around us and to the expectations with which we were raised—rather than viewed relative to our place in the universe or the gestalt of our personal existence. What we need in order to judge the irrationality of the things about which we fret is a sense of scale and perspective. De Botton is providing us with a long historical view; the great evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins gives us a genetic and probabilistic one:

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Sahara. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively outnumbers the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

To some, these facts may be depressing; to me they are comforting. But we’ll deal in a moment with what to do with our newfound perspective; for now it’s enough just to note the facts. And all the facts point to a universe that is utterly indifferent to your body-mass index, your latest promotion, or how well-organized your reference filing system is. You neighbors may pretend to care—and then proceed to think of you with acrimonious covetousness or jealousy—but, as the Copernican principle reminds us, in the long run your neighbors are just like you: a speck, on a speck, on a speck. (Listen to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s interview in the last part of this Radiolab segment to have this concept dizzyingly driven home.) But even if we were to abandon all reason and evidence and assume the human race enjoys some sort of privileged status in the affairs of the universe, we need only remember that each of us is one among 6.6 billion people (give or take), and that even if you were to attain a level of accomplishment that (let’s face it) you could never even dream of approaching—say, becoming prime minister of Canada—the vast majority of people now and ever living will never even have heard of you. Let’s further suspend disbelief and presume that measuring your success against those of your peers is a worthwhile and significant undertaking. Remember, then, that with each subsequent rise through a social stratum comes an increasingly insurmountable and intimidating group of competitors. And this is just as true of prime ministers and emperors as it is of district managers and fry cooks.

If we are to accept achievement as the vehicle to guide us through life, we must at least admit to ourselves that it’s a ferris wheel we’re riding and not a bullet train. I’m ready to make that admission. I say fuck this ride; let’s go eat cotton candy.

Hope and Comfort

And indeed this is why there is no despair when we truly confront the empty promises of achievement—and view our work and accomplishments in the light of that insight. We don’t give up and shake our fists at the unfeeling universe and embrace total idleness. Nor do we ignore the awesome preciousness of the life and time that chance has bestowed upon us. We try to be nice, have a little fun, and expand our awareness of the world we live in. We do the best work we can, but we don’t fret when we fail, nor do we jeopardize the quality of our work—or the happiness of our days—by bowing to the pressure to take on more than we can handle.

Albert Camus was but one of many philosophers and poets seriously to tackle the question of how we are to fill up the time that we have while we are here on earth, but I like many of his answers best. He saw the futilely struggling Sisyphus as a strangely sympathetic figure. Camus—who was in fact one of the more accomplished and ethically upright individuals with which the caprices of the genetic blender have gifted our species—embraced the absurd futility and overwhelming insignificance of our individual lives as a counterintuitive source of hope and empowerment. “The workman of today works every day in his life at the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd [than that of Sisyphus]. But it is tragic only at the rare moments when it becomes conscious.”

Camus believes that it is not the activity of work that leads us to despair, but the hope for some sort of grand success that will never come. Insofar as we can resist the temptation to view our lives as goal-driven in this way, we have at least the prospect of happiness. As The Underachiever’s Manifesto has it: “striving is suffering.” It is only by accepting the illusory nature of achievement that we can hope to transcend it. Would it be mawkish of me to invoke Steve Jobs?: “our time is limited, so don’t waste time living someone else’s life.”

There are also more sublunary and practical reasons why the pressure for extraordinary achievement is counterproductive. The diet that permits the occasional bucket of french fries is the one more likely to be adhered to, and the exercise regime that demands only a gentle stroll every day rather than a heart-pounding decathlon is the one more likely actually to be followed. Extreme expectations apply extreme stress and create extreme resistance and procrastination. In so doing, they undermine our ability to get anything we want. We forfeit perfectly serviceable rewards in the pursuit of enormous and unattainable ones.

So calm down. Pour yourself a glass of port, cuddle up in front of the fire with a book that you’ll probably never finish, and chill. The hard part of life is done: you are here and alive to read these words. As the Manifesto commands, “stop worrying about being perfect. Dedicate yourself to the pleasures and benefits of mediocrity.” For my part, I’m formulating precisely one New Year’s resolution. Contrary to what this essay may seem to imply, it’s not “be a lazy sod,” but rather merely to be easier on myself this year and enjoy the go-round. And, let’s not kid ourselves, if you reached the end of this essay, it’s probably a resolution you should give some consideration too.

”Death and Underachievement: A Guide to Happiness in Work” was written by Ryan Norbauer for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 31, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Dear Me: Get to work

Ethan — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 06:32:09 -0400

The Problem

GTD is all about rapid, intuitive selection of what you need to be working on now. Whip out your context list appropriate for the time-place-opportunity-space you are in now. Scan through it, then do.

For the longest time I was having a problem with this. I’d scan through my context lists and I’d see things like:

Pack box up

Ask Bob about meeting

Review new design book

Send Cherry income information

Scanning down a list of actions in a context list should be like running your hand across a silk sheet. Scanning through these tasks felt less like silk and more like sand paper. Pack what into the box? What did I need to know about the meeting? Review the book for what, specifically?

With a moment’s thought I could remember what I meant when I wrote most of these tasks, but they were difficult (if not impossible) to scan through, select rapidly and then act on. I was losing speed. Mind less like water, more like ketchup.

Insight

Looking back, it’s not hard to see what the problem was: unclear writing. I simply wasn’t being descriptive enough. Yet for the longest time I didn’t see this. The actions were “understandable enough” with a bit of work. That “bit of work”, of course, is the silent killer of GTD. Anytime you are putting in work to decipher your system, your energy and productivity are being slowly siphoned away.

Tasks must be immediately clear without needing interpretation. To use a geeky metaphor, they are precompiled instructions waiting for execution, not a script that’s interpreted at run time.

After I realized this, I tried to address it, but I ended up with excessive detail (and thus wasted time in the planning stage) or fell back into old habits of too little information.

Then I started using a hack: I stopped deferring my tasks and started getting someone else to do them for me.

Solution: Write your tasks as if you are delegating them to someone you actually know.

Ok, back to reality: it would be nice if there was someone willing to actually do all my tasks, but that’s not the case. None the less, I stopped writing my tasks down as if I was going to do them later, and I started to literally write as if I was delegating them to someone else.

To make this trick work, you need a delegatee firmly in mind:

Someone real. It doesn’t help if, every time you are going to faux-delegate, you have to re-imagine some fictional character.
Ideally someone a bit outside your knowledge domain. This prevents a certain laziness in phrasing tasks.
Someone that you don’t normally delegate a lot of tasks to. Again, avoiding the “common knowledge” problem.

Every time I draft a task, I am mentally writing it as if I will be handing my context list over to someone else (in this case, it’s my wife Bee since she’s at least twice as clever as I am but whose work has little overlap with mine). These are, of course, all my tasks, but I am quite literally delegating (not simply deferring) when I’m writing them down.

Example

Revisiting the poorly written task in my example above, I keep my delegatee firmly in mind and tell them to:

Pack winter clothes in corner of bedroom into airmail box

Ask Bob for the date of the next website revamp meeting

Review “Page Design” book for three examples of three column page layout

Send Cherry second quarter income statements (doc link in notes)

Why this works

The secret to all this is that, when you are writing down your deferred tasks “normally”, in truth you’re actually delegating but you just don’t realize it. You are simply delegating to your future self. The problem is that, in our present-self state of mind when planning tasks, we are filling in the gaps in our writing with present-knowledge. This knowledge fades quickly and by the time our future-self picks up the work, the mortar of that transient information has dissolved, turning what seemed to be a solid, actionable task into an unclear jumble of words. By shifting our mindset from “I’ll do this later” to “I need to assign this to so-and-so”, we hack around this problem.

So tighten up the descriptiveness of your tasks today: defer as if you delegate. And when you finally have an army of minions that you really can delegate your every whim to, you’ll be ready with tasks in hand.

”Dear Me: Get to work” was written by Ethan Schoonover for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 24, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

How I Made My Presentations a Little Better

Merlin Mann — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 10:51:49 -0400

Since my Google Tech Talk (previously) caught fire last month (it’s gotten over 100,000 views so far), I’ve been receiving a lot of really nice email, comments, and questions about how I put my presentations together. I’m happy to oblige.

First, of course, please understand that I don’t pretend to be any kind of expert about this stuff — I’m barely even a student. I’ve cobbled together whatever I have right now based mostly on the work of much smarter and more talented people, so I’m not claiming to have invented any of this stuff. I’ve been fortunate to finally start figuring out the right mix of visuals and presentation style that (I hope) works for my personality and what I have to say.

Anyhow, here’s what I’ve been learning so far, starting with the giants on whose shoulders I’d love to stand.

Presentation Zen

I’ll confess that I giggled like a schoolgirl when Garr Reynolds said he was featuring my Google Talk on his site today. Especially since I’ve studied his own slides, posts, and links for months now, and have stolen liberally from what I learned there. Thanks, Garr. I’m totally honored.

I love that Garr gets how the slides in your presentation are about visual story-telling that complements your presence and speaking. They are not a script to be acted-out, or a book to be printed and read aloud, word for word.

Some of my favorite links on his site led me to learning more about Guy Kawasaki’s approach and to seeing the power in the simplicity of “the Takahashi Method”.

Again: all inspiring stuff, even if you don’t precisely emulate or follow every tip on the site.

Beyond Bullet Points

I learned about this book from Matt Haughey, and I agree with Matt that the premise of the book is just invaluable.

While you will get most of the (often-re-re-repeated) gist quickly, the message of Cliff Atkinson’s book is worth tattooing on your forehead: “Tell a story that makes the audience into the protagonist, then demonstrate how your approach to solving their problem will help them win in the end.” (Paraphrasing, but I think that’s pretty close)

Also, suck up your pride, and make yourself fill out Cliff’s Word template (available here) for telling your story. Even if you don’t use it as the basis for your final presentation, you might find the experience more useful than any other single thing you do to improve your show. Helped mine a lot.

Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule

Although I don’t always follow Guy’s rule, it’s always in the back of my mind. So much so, that, in my opinion, if you’re really struggling with your visuals, it’s worth making “10-20-30” a rule that you break only with mindful and deliberate care. At least until you’re more comfortable with what you want to say, and how you want to say it, hew to Guy’s party line:

It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

Get in, get out, and don’t make people squint. Awesome.

iStockPhoto

I love the look of a very simple graphic alongside a very few words. It’s something Steve Jobs does really well, and it’s a look I wanted to steal.

iStockPhoto is my favorite resource for finding inexpensive images to license for presentations. Their search engine is swell, and their lightboxes make it easy to snag interesting images and save them for potential use in the future (which I recommend you do as you browse on each visit — regardless of the specific preso you’re there to shop for).

43F: Your best tip on doing presentations

The response from readers on this thread was amazing, and it taught me a dozen great techniques and tricks that I’m trying to put into use every time I prepare to speak now.

What I’ve (finally) learned about presenting

I’m still pretty C+ at this stuff, myself, and free advice is worth what you paid for it, but here’s my favorite things I’ve learned about actually getting up there, in front of a crowd of warm bodies.

Do a cold open

Metaphorically: clear your throat as little as possible when you start. Try to open with something in the real world — an anecdote, a memory, an image, something that grounds your talk in the “right now” and that skips the whole “Here are the nine things you will learn today…” jibber jabber. You can always do an introduction second, once you’ve set the tone and gotten people’s interest.

Work the notes field

I capture the 2-4 mini-points I want to hit in each slide’s Notes field (Can I just mention? I love Keynote!). I make the type ginormous and start each line with 1-2 ALLCAPS words that are a glance-able cue for the point to make. I can riff and boogie all I want, then know where I need to land to keep things moving in the way I want.

Think: “Stephen Colbert”

You know how Stephen Colbert does “The Wørd?” He directly addresses the audience while “slides” appear next to his head acting as a kind of Greek chorus. He not only doesn’t acknowledge the slides — they often contradict exactly what he is saying. (This is what makes this — as we say in the business — “funny”)

I’m not suggesting your slides should undermine you, but consider sometimes showing images and text that make an orthogonal point to what you’re saying aloud to the audience at that moment. Let them discover the point (or the joke) without you leaning on it.

Let the slide serve your message, rather than letting you (and your personality and timing) be governed by the slide. That’s ‘death,’ and that’s “The Wørd.”

Finish early

Man, I’ve always been terrible at this, and it turns out it’s about the rudest thing you can do.

Running long not only says you weren’t properly prepared for the time you were allotted, it leaves no time for the best part of every presentation for me: the Q&A. I love interacting with the audience and getting a chance to apply all that hand-waving to real-world questions.

There’s tons more for me to learn, but it’s already been a lot of fun to take this information and test it on the road.

It’s an exhilarating experience to get to talk to people about something that genuinely excites you. I believe that finding a way to get them excited, too, is essentially what this stuff is all about.

”How I Made My Presentations a Little Better” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 23, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43f Feature: Michael Buffington's "How I use iGTD"

Merlin Mann — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:55:59 -0400

Michael Buffington is a pal of mine who’s a talented developer and all-around swell fellow. I got to work with him a bit on the Stikkit project and, in some of our offline talks on productivity stuff, I was intrigued to learn about some of his ninja geek skillz.

I asked Michael to write up a series on some of his favorite tricks to get his stuff done, and he kindly obliged. Here’s part one.

—Merlin

How I use iGTD

by Michael Buffington

This is the first part in a multipart series about using iGTD with Quicksilver and how it’s changed my life, allowed me to grow hair where I never thought it possible, and more importantly, spend more quality time with my children (who are, as you might know, super humans with indescribable special abilities).

I’m a recent and somewhat enthusiastic convert to GTD. I have had the good fortune of starting to manage my digital life with GTD the same day Merlin first mentioned a great application for OS X called iGTD.

I have to admit though that I’m not a very hard core GTD follower yet. The most important parts of GTD for me are getting my tasks out of my head the moment they pop into existence, and putting them into some sort of system I can trust. iGTD allows me to do exactly that in a very intuitive way, but if I’m having a good day I only ever bring iGTD into focus when I’m not sure what’s next on my list.

“I’ve emphasized this before already, but for me the most important part of GTD is writing tasks that you can follow as if you’re a robot…”

For task capturing, I use Quicksilver, and I have to say it’s a slice of heaven. Without a doubt my life has improved quite measurably both because of GTD, and the iGTD plugin for Quicksilver.

So at the most basic level, here’s how I use iGTD to reinforce what I think is the most important behavior for leading a GTD lifestyle:

I invoke Quicksilver. I hit the period (“.”) key to switch to text entry mode. Some people have different settings, so the the important part here is invoking text entry.

I begin typing out my task with some simple markup that iGTD understands. For this blog entry, I once wrote:

@blog write a blog entry about how I use iGTD to capture tasks [43f]

I then hit tab and type iGTD so I can send the text I entered to iGTD. I hit enter, and I know that my task has been captured. I even set iGTD so that it doesn’t pop up once I’ve captured a task, I simply trust that it’s there.

Here’s a quick screencast of the process in action - it’s worth noting that the screencast is all of a few seconds long, and the actual task capturing part is incredibly quick.

Click To Play

I’ve emphasized this before already, but for me the most important part of GTD is writing tasks that you can follow as if you’re a robot (avoiding writing ambiguous sounding tasks in favor of writing very “actionable” tasks) and getting those tasks capture the moment you think of them.

So I’ll be writing code, thinking about how to do something like simulate multiple inheritance in Ruby when unannounced the thought “I should call the local game place to see if my reality might someday be shared with a Nintendo Wii of my very own” takes center stage. If I weren’t adhering to GTD practices, I’d ignore that thought and move on, but it’d nag me. It’d keep nagging me, and my focus would suffer.

With Quicksilver and iGTD I get the task out of head and into a place I trust, and because it took mere seconds to record I’m right back in flow, realizing that if I’m wanting to do multiple inheritance in Ruby I’ve probably designed something incorrectly in the first place.

I become more efficient at what I do, and have less “free radical” thoughts fighting for attention in my head, which makes me a far more patient, confident and relaxed person. That in turn makes play time with the kids sublime.

In the next entry in this series, I’ll write about a particularly horrifying experience I had with iGTD, and what I did to solve the problem.

About the Author

Michael Buffington - A serial entrepreneur and creative technological consultant, Buffington most recently served as the Community Advocate for Values of N, makers of Stikkit and iwantsandy.com. He’s now secretly building games for the masses.

”43f Feature: Michael Buffington's "How I use iGTD"” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 19, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero

Merlin Mann — Tue, 13 Mar 2007 09:37:00 -0400

These are posts from a special 43 Folders series looking at the skills, tools, and attitude needed to empty your email inbox — and then keep it that way. You can visit each of the posts by clicking the title.

And don’t miss the “Related Articles” for our all-time popular posts on productively dealing with email.

**Looking for the Inbox Zero video?**

The full 1-hour video for Merlin’s Inbox Zero presentation at Google is available for free down here — or check out this post about the video and slideshow.

Posts in the Inbox Zero series

43F Series: Inbox Zero [Introduction] - “Clearly, the problem of email overload is taking a toll on all our time, productivity, and sanity, mainly because most of us lack a cohesive system for processing our messages and converting them into appropriate actions as quickly as possible.”
Inbox Zero: Articles of faith - “When I first suggested the email DMZ and said there was a way to get your inbox to zero in 20 minutes, I wasn’t lying. But I was using a definition of “empty” that may not square with your current conception of the email world. So let’s start with a few of my own articles of faith to ensure we’re on the same page going forward.”
Inbox Zero: Five sneaky email cheats - “In the words of the great Lucas Jackson: ‘Yeah, well, sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand.’”
Inbox Zero: Where filters will and won’t help - “[F]ocus on creating filters and scripts for any noisy, frequent, and non-urgent items which can be dealt with all at a pass and later. ”
Inbox Zero: Delete, delete, delete (or, “Fail faster”) - “Just remember that every email you read, re-read, and re-re-re-re-re-read as it sits in that big dumb pile is actually incurring mental debt on your behalf. The interest you pay on email you’re reluctant to deal with is compounded every day and, in all likelihood, it’s what’s led you to feeling like such a useless slacker today.”
Inbox Zero: Schedule email dashes - “If you can get away from being driven by email’s motor and find a way to deal with your work mindfully and on your own terms, you may be startled to see how much easier it is to keep that inbox at zero.”
Inbox Zero: What’s the action here? - “Focus on finding the fastest and straightest path from discovery to completion, and your inbox fu will be strong.”
Inbox Zero: Processing to zero - “You’ll never stay ahead of this stuff if you don’t recalibrate starting today. Give each message as much attention as it needs and not one iota more. Remember the contextuality of triage: if you keep trying to care for dead and doomed patients, you’ll end up losing a lot of the ones who could have actually used your help.”
Inbox Zero: What have you learned? - “Try to learn from what you’ve just experienced, and reapply your new wisdom to the way you treat email every day — nay, every time that little “new mail” chime sounds. You’ve just come out the other side of productivity bankruptcy and have, perhaps for the first time, a clean record and a fresh start.”
Inbox Zero: Better Practices for staying (near) zero - “As a person who has done the near-impossible and managed to establish a temporary beachhead against the occupying email army, you are your own best expert in what needs to change to keep things together, but I’d like to share a few things that have helped me stay email-sane (most of the time).”

These are, to date (2006-03-13), our most popular posts on email and were recently collected in a recap article, “Becoming an Email Ninja.”

Five fast email productivity tips “There’s been a lot of great discussions about email productivity going around on sites I enjoy, so I thought I’d throw in five no-brainers that I’ve seen help a lot of folks.”
Quick tips on processing your email inbox - “The basic idea is to firewall processing as a discrete phase you go through no more than every hour or two at the most. For God’s sake, don’t live in your Inbox if there’s any way you can avoid it.”
Writing sensible email messages - “As we’ve seen before, getting your inbound email under control will give you a huge productivity boost, but what about all the emails you send? If you want to be a good email citizen and ensure the kind of results you’re looking for, you’ll need to craft messages that are concise and easy to deal with. ”
Five email tics I’d love for you to lose - “For the love of God, people; can we get the word out on these?”
My email diet - “Gmail’s made me see the value of having very few actual folders for storing new and archived mail. It makes it much easier to track and organize your mail on the fly, plus Google’s search and labeling tools let you confidently shunt items out of your inbox constantly without fear of having stuff disappear. So I decided to try a little experiment.”
Fresh Start: The Email DMZ - “Think about it: how much stuff in your life has gotten unmanageable simply because you decided at some point that you were too behind to ever make a difference? More than anything you need a way to recover these projects from the brink — to find the handle that lets you stop making it worse and start seeing a way back toward daylight.”
4-1/2 tiny ways to master Mail.app - “Seriously, though, suck it up and just check for new mail as seldom as your job and your patience will possibly permit. Really push the envelope on this, even just for half a day, and see if you don’t notice a difference. The world actually can spin without you for a while (but just a little while).”
Open Thread: The value and quality of email at work - “If I ran a company and learned that most of my employees were spending that much time touching internal email, I’d ask my managers: ‘For how many and which employees is six hours of email each day adding value to the company?’ Maybe that’s just me.”

New: Merlin’s Inbox Zero Presentation

Merlin does a live presentation on Inbox Zero from time to time. The latest version of the presentation was delivered on July 23, 2007 at a Google Tech Talk in Mountain View, CA. You can download a PDF of the slides for the presentation and can watch the 58-minute video of the talk and Q&A right here:

Get Inbox Zero — Live and in Person

Bring Inbox Zero to your company by inviting Merlin to speak at your next event. It’s fast and painless to book Merlin through Premiere. »

”43 Folders Series: Inbox Zero” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on March 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Stikkit: Magic words, functional emails, and a handy cheat sheet

Merlin Mann — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 11:20:55 -0500

(Disclosure: I’m a proud member of Stikkit’s advisory board)

As promised, I wanted to start sharing some of the reasons I’ve been digging Stikkit, so I thought I’d begin at the beginning: Stikkit’s use of “magic words” to do stuff based on your typing natural (albeit geeky) language into a blank note. There’s a lot more to Stikkit than magic words, but this is a great place to start. (And, yeah, future posts will be more about how to implement stuff with Stikkit, but it’s worthwhile to start with the mechanics.)

[Note: this is one of those posts that you might want to print out]

So let’s say I want to schedule lunch with my old roommate, Jake, during a notional trip to Sarasota later this week. I might create a new blank stikkit then add the following contents:

Lunch with Jake at The French Hearth on Friday at 11:30 directions: http://map.example.com/76868/ We talked about this on the phone !1/30 @ !12:50pm (see: {123456}) Jake Short 850-555-1212 share jake@example.com myadmin@example.com remind us all @appointments travel Sarasota JakeShort p:social

Ok, first — and as usual with my infamously over-the-top demos — there’s a lot more going on here than is strictly necessary (e.g., I could have just typed “Lunch with Jake on Friday at 11:30” and been done with it). But, since this is partly about showing the flexibility of multiple magic words in action, I wanted to demonstrate to you how that crapload of text up there turns into this finished and functional Stikkit:

After the cut are a couple more detailed pics, followed by an explanation of what’s happening in my example, as well as an Unofficial Stikkit Cheat Sheet.

So where ’s the magic here? Well, roughly in order of appearance…

Stikkit gets that this contains a calendar event (“…Friday at 11:30”); so, it generates a new calendar entry for me
- I could put all of that info on one line, but I think this way looks a bit tidier; note that Stikkit doesn’t care either way
- Your calendar can be subscribed to in iCal, GCal, or 30 Boxes
Stikkit gets that those directions are a URL, so it hotlinks it
Stikkit gets that I want to reference another stikkit ("123456" is the Stikkit ID for a note about having called Jake), so it hotlinks to that stikkit inline.
Thanks to those handy “!”s I added in front of words I want not to be magical ("!1/30 @ !12:50pm"), Stikkit understands that the date and time in that line shouldn’t be understood as a new event (so it skips over parsing them).
Owing to the familiar pattern of two consecutive title-cased words, Stikkit gets that “Jake Short” is probably a person (or, what Stikkit calls a Peep); it creates a new peep entry for Jake in the address book and adds what it gets is his phone number
Stikkit gets that I want to share this particular stikkit with someone who probably doesn’t have an account on the site yet (but whose email I know); Stikkit sends the person an email and gives them access. (more on the functional contents of that email in a minute)
Stikkit gets that I want to be reminded of this event via email and SMS (and that I have asked that all other shared users be reminded as well)
Stikkit gets that I have my own squirrely personal taxonomy for organizing my stikkits so, recognizing that “@” symbol (or “tag as”) it files this stikkit under my tags for “appointments,” “travel,” and so on. (This lets me later view all stikkits under a given tag at once.)

So Stikkit seems pretty smart in its own way. Once you and Stikkit get good at talking with each other, it’s generally smooth sailing.

Now let’s go back and have a look at the email that my pal, Jake, will get out of this:

Merlin has passed you a stikkit named “Lunch with Jake at The French Hearth” [...]

You’ll find this stikkit on the web at http://www.stikkit.com/stikkits/REDACTED

___STIKKIT STARTS HERE___ Lunch with Jake at The French Hearth on Friday at 11:30 directions: http://map.example.com/76868/ We talked about this on the phone !1/30 @ !12:50pm (see: {123456}) Jake Short 850-555-1212 share jake@example.com myadmin@example.com remind us all @appointments travel Sarasota JakeShort p:social ___STIKKIT ENDS HERE___

[x] send me email when anyone updates or comments on this stikkit (delete the x in the box to turn this off)

See you there!

A few things to note.

The email Jake receives attaches a .ics version of the appointment, which lets him easily add this event to his own iCal, Gcal, or (I’m told by my wife) even Outlook.
Jake can reply to this email and change anything that appears between the 2 STIKKIT tags. Those changes are then automagically made to the web version of the stikkit. Anyone with whom this stikkit is shared can do the same thing, allowing us to collaborate almost exclusively through email. (I admit that, in practice, this email editing feature still kind of blows my mind)
In that reply, Jake can uncheck the [x] to stop receiving email updates whenever the stikkit changes
Anything in the reply that Jake types above the quoted text will be added to the Stikkit as an external comment (so we don’t start polluting our actual shared note with meta-chatter)

I realize this is a lot to digest, and you may want to just jump in and play with this for yourself. If so, it helps a lot to have a copy of the basic "magic words" in Stikkit (provided below). I also highly recommend visiting the Stikkit forums, where Michael Buffington maintains a terrific collection of tutorials and screencasts, and where many like-minded Stikkiteers participate actively in discussions, sharing hacks, and so on.

# Stikkit Cheat Sheet

Boosted directly from the Stikkit Help window.

Stikkit Events

today or tomorrow or next tuesday
michael’s birthday is on dec 30th
today at 4pm or tomorrow before 12p
party on dec 30th at 5pm
ski trip between 12/25 and 12/30

Stikkit To-Dos

get a dog
buy eggs
make an appointment
+ sweep floor
- mop floor

Stikkit Bookmarks

This is the name of my bookmark
http://theurl.com/

Tags

tag as one, two, three
@something, "something else"

Sharing

share with nickname
share with someone@somewhere.com

Reminders

remind me
remind us all

Stop Stikkit Thinking

!! turns off thinking for the entire stikkit
! turns off thinking for a paragraph
place an exclamation mark in front of any otherwise magical word like !tomorrow to hide it from Stikkit

Start Stikkit Thinking

stikkit, or stikkit: or s, or s: turns on thinking for a single paragraph

As you can see, there’s a lot going on in Stikkit, so this will most likely evolve into a regular feature here. I’m planning posts that’ll show you how to use Stikkit as your calendar and appointment maker, as a meeting notes app + light project management tool, as well as how you can set Stikkit up as a basic GTD-like personal producivity system.

N.B.: Comments for the post are open, but I have to warn you in advance that I’m not exactly a Level 3 support stud (and, believe me, you will have a lot of questions about how Stikkit works). The forums are much better staffed for troubleshooting, getting help, and hosting clever remarks on server uptime. Still, I’m happy to talk about the example above and field any questions that I’m qualified to answer.

(Disclosure reminder: I’m a proud member of Stikkit’s advisory board)

”Stikkit: Magic words, functional emails, and a handy cheat sheet” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on February 07, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

6 powerful "look into" verbs (+ 1 to avoid)

Merlin Mann — Sun, 15 Oct 2006 11:17:02 -0400

In one of the recent podcast interviews I did with David Allen, we talked about procrastination and how he tries to get people — especially knowledge workers — back to just “cranking widgets.”

I love this term, because, in his humorous way, David captures how any thing we want to accomplish in this world eventually has to manifest itself in an intentional physical activity. Seemingly over-huge super-projects like “World Peace,” “Cancer Cure,” or “Find Mutually Satisfying Vehicle for Jim Belushi” all still come down to physical actions, such as picking up a phone or typing an email.

And David is wise, in that interview, also to highlight the importance of what he refers to as a “‘look-into’ project,” which just means that even deciding if a project is interesting and useful to undertake can be a project in itself. It also means that, even with an outcome of “deciding,” that meta-project still consists solely of physical actions. In this case, it’s the physical actions that help you locate the additional information you’ll need to make a timely and wise decision about whether to proceed at all. In sum, no matter what, it all still should come back to widgets and how they get cranked.

Like a lot of you, I’ve struggled with how you turn “thinky work” into physical action widgets, but here are a few of my favorite task-verbs to get you started in the right direction. They’re presented here in a rough approximation of the order in which I use them in my own “look-into” projects:

web-research - Usually my first stop in learning the broadest possible information about anything. And, for me, that means I’m primarily visiting two sites: Wikipedia and Google. Go to either or both and just type in the keywords that get you started. Then just follow your nose for a few minutes. If you started every project with 20 minutes of Wikipedia and Google time, you’d already be so much further along than if you’d just sat around staring into space, waiting for kismet to bring you a slice of cake. At least now you have something to start with. Yes, you probably have your own go-to sites for this kind of work; just do remember to use them.
brainstorm - Try doodling, free writing, white-boarding, or mind-mapping to freely generate ideas, possibilities, and connections. Whatever works best for you in your own situation. You must give yourself permission to really cut loose and not evaluate here — as they say, the goal is quantity not quality. You’re just looking to stimulate new nouns and verbs that that can provide hooks into finding more information. Lightly structured brainstorming is the best way to shape unrelated and seemingly unconnected material into a useful map for further action.
email - Once you’ve given yourself an independent education on a topic and feel that you’ve learned enough to ask good questions, consider writing a short email asking for advice and input from a colleague or people on your team. All the usual rules apply here, but a fast email along the lines of “Do you have a preference in foo over bar, and why?” can be a quick way to bring one honeycomb of the hive mind’s experience quickly into play.
call - Some of the information you need to make decisions is almost certainly available in the brain of someone close to you. When needed, make a short call to someone who you think can help guide your way. This could be anything from the person in the next cube to a customer service line to a library reference desk to that wisest of institutional historians, your Mom. Again, all the usual admonitions about respecting time still apply, but a phone call, used efficiently, can be the fastest path to an answer.
agenda - If you have a big pile of a little questions that can wait for now, just capture them all into your list for “agenda-boss,” “agenda-team,” “agenda-spouse” or what have you. You can then quickly blow through them all at one time. (And yes, Professor Grammarpants, this is technically a verb, since it’s just a short way of writing “Ask n person next time I see them…”)
write - Once you’ve gathered any amount of information — and, seriously, don’t go to committee forever on this stuff — try writing a letter, email, one-page-report, or even a theoretical blog post about your topic. No one ever needs to see it, but if you were to explain everything you’ve learned about your new topic alongside how you feel about it, you might be surprised to discover you know, think, and feel more than you had realized before you started writing. My layman’s theory here is that writing puts demands on the left side of your brain to turn mushy clouds of ideas into semi-coherent pyramids of information. (Sometimes those pyramids will end up looking more like they were created by a dog’s behind than having arisen from the dream-visions of Pharaohs, but you’ll never find out until you commit that “Shitty First Draft”)

You’ll notice I left off the verb you were really casting about for here, which is almost certainly “decide.” This is not an oversight.

This one I can’t help you with, because — unless you own and utilize a jokey “Executive Decision Maker” purchased from the Sky Mall catalog — deciding is most definitely not a physical action.

Deciding, as I hope you learned today, is actually a kind of project outcome. Trying to pretend it’s an action, as your author has painfully discovered, is like trying to see our notional dog’s yard pyramid as an “@dogbowl” action; that’s simply not how it works and it completely confuses the process and order of thinking vs. deciding vs. doing.

Decisions can only be delivered after you’ve nourished them with timely and thought-provoking information. Once the fetal decision has consumed these sufficient data, a bouncy baby outcome cannot help but be born. You just need to be there to slap it on the ass and give it a good name. Just please don’t call it a verb.

”6 powerful "look into" verbs (+ 1 to avoid)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 15, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

GTD: Priorities don't exist in a vacuum

Merlin Mann — Sun, 01 Oct 2006 20:02:15 -0400

If you’re a fan of Getting Things Done, you’re familiar with the Four Criteria Model for choosing tasks. It’s where the rubber meets the road in GTD, because it’s the way you decide, in the moment, how any one of those wonderful tasks you’ve been tracking in your big system actually gets done.

As common sense as it seems to GTD’ers, this model is one of the more controversial aspects of Getting Things Done for a simple reason: it posits that priority is not the only factor in deciding what to do at a given time. It’s just one of four factors, which include, all told:

Context - Where are you? What tools are available? What are the limits and possibilities unique to this moment?
Time available - Do you have, for example, 30 seconds, 30 minutes, or 30 hours available to you right now? What tasks could you accomplish given the time you have?
Energy available - Are you full of energy, is your ass dragging, or are you somewhere in between? Which of the tasks on your list could you finish, given that energy level?
Priority - If you had access to all the tools, opportunities, time, and energy you needed, what’s the most important or time-sensitive thing you could do right now?

When I’m helping coach people on getting it together, they’re often puzzled by this seeming bit of new-agery — partly, I suspect, because most of us have been conditioned all our lives to think that pre-ordained Priority stamps always trump everything, all the time, always, forever, in all cases, end of story. But is it true, reasonable, or even physically possible to always work this way? Can you will yourself into doing only your identified high-priority items anytime, all the time?

Nope, and I’ll show you one reason why.

Stressful times for Worker Bee

Let’s look at a few challenges that, over the past six months, have faced a notional Worker Bee, leading him to generate high-priority tasks.

You learn you got a citation from those choads in the Homeowner’s Association, and they declare that if you don’t remove that El Camino from your front yard today, they’ll start fining you $200 a day.
Your favorite client emailed you a freakin’ week ago, and you still haven’t responded. You fear that your relationship will be permanently damaged if you don’t respond this morning.
Your bank account is overdrawn and you have to make a deposit or else the late fees and penalties will go up and up and up.
Your sister leaves a voicemail saying that if you don’t pick up the crap you left in her garage, she’s throwing it out tomorrow. Your Boba Fett action figure and Dungeon Master’s Guide are in that garage, and you can’t bear the thought of losing them.

All extremely high priorities to this person, and for good reasons, each. So he has to do them all the second they come up, right? Well, maybe.

Worker Bee buzzes into high-priority action!

But let’s look at some additional factors in the worker bee’s life that affect the immediate do-ability of each of these high-priority tasks — things for which raw priority may not account.

#1 The errant El Camino citation comes up while you’re in Kazakhstan, and the only keys to the car are currently in your right hip pocket — which is also currently in Kazakhstan. How will you move the car right now? You can’t. The context is wrong and, by extension, you don’t have the time (to fly overseas) to take care of it by sundown today. BZZZZZT!
#2 The late email you wanted to send is briefly on your mind as you sit in the Emergency Room holding your sick kid. Well, for one, your priority just got changed for you. And for another, you don’t have a computer or smart phone with you anyhow. No dice, Superdad. BZZZZZT!
#3 That stupid overdraft shows up via BlackBerry while you’re on a quick break from a marathon meeting with your bosses. But you don’t have either your checking account number or your bank card with you, plus you’re due back in that career-defining meeting in 20 seconds. BZZZZZT!
#4 Your beloved geek toys’ endangered status update arrives at the very moment you’re vomiting yellow, half-shrimp-filled goo thanks to the food poisoning you just picked up from that leftover quart of paella. If you weren’t blowing golden chunks, you might be able to make the trip to her house in time, but for now, it’s probably a non-starter. BZZZZZT!

So, did I cheat to start with just priority and only later give you the contextual details? No, not really. That’s actually the point.

Priority mania considered harmful

On some level, this happens to you every day, but even the hugest priority can only be seen clearly in terms of the big picture. Priorities don’t care who they compete with, and, from one vantage point, that’s kinda what makes them priorities.

Hell, Priority Task Number One (flagged “HIGH PRIORITY!!!”) could give a fig whether “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” items 2 through n ever get a single gulp of oxygen. Priorities, left to their own devices, are selfish bastards. That’s their job.

But, remember: priorities represent a snapshot in time and space — they may escalate, de-escalate, disappear, or, more often than not, they’ll be subject to getting bumped by both bigger priorities and by the immutable limitations of time, space, and being a corporeal (sometimes vomiting) human being. Sucks, but it’s life, right?

Sidebar: Flag burning

Consider how often you use the “HIGH PRIORITY!!!” flag not as a practical planning tool, but as a way to try and motivate yourself. Is it really the priority that’s set to “HIGH” — or is it just your anxiety and guilt about being behind right now?

Negotiation skills

The first thing to know is that in GTD, there are three ways of resolving a problematic commitment — you can either:

complete it (jump on a plane; borrow a computer; cancel the boss meeting to fetch your bank card; drive while barfing copiously all over yourself)
renegotiate the commitment (sweet-talk the ultimatum givers; plan to apologize later to the client; reschedule the meeting)
break it (suck up the fact you’re getting fined, losing a client, or never seeing your Dungeon Dice again, then just pick up the pieces later on)

You can choose how you deal with high-priority items that can’t be done when and how you’d like, but you’ll never bend the space-time continuum. Plus, you’ll probably strain your lower back trying.

Who’s flagging who?

This is not by any means to say that priorities aren’t important. I mean, that’s why they’re called priorities. But you have to take care to understand the larger picture at all times, and to not become so obsessed about priority-centric planning that you create impossible situations and unreasonable expectations for yourself. It’s a sure path to serial procrastination for one thing.

When you’re self-aware and honest enough tomorrow morning to say “Screw it, I’m going to sharpen pencils for 10 minutes” or “You know, this deadline is impossible without flipping my life upside down” you’re turning a corner. You’ve begun to permit yourself a broader understanding of the real world, in which, as the sole traffic cop for your life, you are in the unique position to decide what’s do-able at any given moment.

“But…I’m, like, important”

I imagine I’ll hear from people in comments who have the kind of incredibly important job where Horrible Things happen if they don’t prioritize the shit out of everything and do it all flawlessly each day. Or maybe they work in Candy Land, where lollipops grow on trees and any perceived priority can be made to trump reality as easily as delicious nectar can be sipped from a flower. But, for the rest of us, I stand by the point: obsess single-mindedly over priority at your peril.

Unless you can always satisfy the big red letter commitments you’ve created for yourself — as well as the ones that are constantly being generated for you by others — an obsession with priority alone is pointlessly stress-inducing, unhealthy, and unrealistic. The truth is that sometimes you have crap days, pencils need to be sharpened, or maybe you just don’t have the tools or energy to do what you want the second you want. That’s life, pal. Deal.

So, instead of having an aneurysm about it, just rally, and do what you can with what you’ve got. That’s all any of us can really do, and faking it in order to feel more productive (or more important) gets you no place fast.

”GTD: Priorities don't exist in a vacuum” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 01, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Process email faster with Mail Act-On

Merlin Mann — Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:56:00 -0400

My usage of Mail Act-On, while far from novel, has revolutionized the speed with which I can blow through email processing.

If you’ve never seen it before, Mail Act-On is a very clever Mail.app plugin that lets you create key commands that execute Rules you’ve generated in your Preferences. Sounds pretty dull, right? Absolutely. Until you start putting this stuff into action and learn how painfully slow all that draggy mc drag drag business is. Here’s how I’ve set mine up.

Step 0: Remap “`Caps Lock`”

First off: do yourself the biggest favor ever, and make that stupid “Caps Lock” key into something more useful. In the months since I first mentioned remapping this typewriter relic using third-party utilities, the folks behind OS X have been kind enough to bake it right into the Keyboard & Mouse PreferencePane (“[Apple] > System Preferences... > Keyboard & Mouse > Keyboard > Modifier Keys”).

As your attorney, I advise you to immediately map “Caps Lock” to “Ctrl” since it’s about to make your life a little better, thanks to Mail Act-On — which relies heavily on the “Ctrl” key, as you’ll see — although you’ll get way faster at many key commands as a result. Plus it doesn’t bend your pinky up all weird.

Okay, with that nonsense out of the way, let’s go make some rules.

(Important: If you’ve never set up Mail Act-On rules before, there’s a few things you’ll need to know, so be sure to first check out the FAQ).

To archive

This first one is really basic, although it’s certainly the one I use most — moving selected messages to my Archive folder.

That should be mostly self-explanatory, except remember that you can only add currently-visible mailbox sub-folders to a Mail.App rule. If you can’t find the folder you want, cancel out and make sure it’s first visible in your mailboxes and folders list over on the left (flip the little “reveal” triangle until you can see the folder you want).

Next up, it gets a bit more interesting.

To respond

This one is a workhorse; it takes the selected messages, flags them, and moves them into my Respond folder.

As I’ve said, I use a combination of flagging and mailbox location to create Smart Folders — that way I can quickly glance, say, messages I’ve received 3-7 days ago that still need a response.

Handy way to catch up or just to make sure things don’t fall between the cracks.

To respond…some time

The next one shows a really simple example of how you can make Mail Act-On work in concert with its muscle-bound big brother, Mail Tags.

In this case I’m adding a priority tag that — again with Smart Folders — gives me control over what kind of un-responded email I want to see. This rule gets a workout whenever I get mission-critical epistles like “Will you review my $500 Windows app?” and “You should totally link to photos of my kitty!”

Like most GTD-ers, I don’t like to rely too heavily on prioritization as its own thing, but if I’m traveling or whenever things get really hectic for a few days, I need a fast way to separate the wheat from the chaff, and this helps a lot with that.

I’m really just scratching the surface on what you can do with Mail Act-On — I’m sure there are power users out there who are doing much sexier stuff with it — but I wanted to make sure people know that this is most definitely not just for geeks and high-volume email users. In my opinion, this is functionality that should (and eventually will) be included as a stock feature in Mail.app.

As I said in Inbox Zero, excellent processing is one of the ninja email moves. And for even the most casual user of Mail.app, Mail Act-On can make that road to ninjahood so much faster and less annoying.

”Process email faster with Mail Act-On” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 15, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"