Action Based

Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking

Merlin — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:47:32 -0400

The other day, I was talking with someone who is trying to encourage a Getting Things Done-like work approach amongst the people on his team. We started talking about which parts of David Allen’s GTD system appear to have the greatest long-term impact on the people who have adopted it and who ultimately stick with it for years.

When asked to distill everything down to its most powerful concepts, I came up with three, and here’s how I’d summarize each:

Outcome-Based Thinking. Articulating in the most speciﬁc terms possible what a successful outcome looks like for any given use of your time. Or as I like to put it, “How will I know when I’m done with this?”
The Next Action. Knowing that you don’t need to track everything you could conceivably do about a Project; you just need to know the next physical action that would get you closer to completion.
The Review. Accepting that the heart of the Trusted System that lets you move through a day with a high tolerance for ambiguity is the knowledge that eventually everything you’re doing gets looked at once a week without fail.

While I think stuff like ubiquitous capture, the Natural Planning Model, the Two-Minute Rule, and many other bits are arguably as important, these are the three things that I feel have the biggest impact on how people’s results change over time.

If you focus on trying to master these three things in the service of stuff you think is valuable, you’re going to accomplish some grand work.

Slightly related, I wanted to share a modest, GTD-esque idea for a fast way to identify the actual Project and Next Action from within a big bunch of “stuff.”

Think about the thing that’s most on your mind right now. It’s probably not the thing you think is most on your mind; the stuff that’s really getting our attention likes to run behind the refrigerator whenever we turn the lights on. But, anyway. Got it? Okay.

Let’s say you now have in your mind something that needs to be different than how it currently is. For me it’s:

Slides for talk in Arizona

If I re-articulate that in the following format:

I need to $FOO because I want to $BAR

I get something like this:

I need to spend an hour cleaning up my Keynote slides because I want to give a great talk on Inbox Zero next Friday.

Now I’ve said something I can use; I have a Next Action (reviewing and editing my slides for 60 minutes) and a Project (presenting a kickass talk in Scottsdale).

This is Outcome-Based Thinking 101, but I think it can be a powerful way to focus when you’re feeling adrift about what to do with a something.

Give it a try, forcing yourself to sketch more than the shadows of anxiety, priority, or resignation. Envision what this would look like if you really kicked ass, then ﬁgure out the next physical action that gets your kicking foot into motion.

”Foo for Bar: Kicking Ass with Outcome-Based Thinking” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 08, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Getting Sandy in my Face

gordonmeyer — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 20:03:09 -0500

For quite a while now, Tasks Jr has been my task management tool of choice. I switched to it from my own Tinderbox-based system after I decided that having access to my list from any ‘net-connected system was important to me. But now I’ve switched again.

Over time, the aesthetics of Tasks Jr’s design, its limitations (which are resolved by the more advanced versions, I must admit), and the fact that a recent MySQL/PHP update at my web host caused problems made me think about ﬁnding another solution.

So I’ve begun the great migration to Values of n’s Sandy. Its integration with Twitter and the almost magical email-based interface are icing on the cake, beyond what Tasks Jr offered.

The aphorism “out of sight, out of mind” could have been created with me in mind. To make the most of any system, Tasks Jr or Sandy, I need to have it constantly open and visible. With a web site, it’s easy to lose the window when opening another URL, or simply absentmindedly closing a Safari window. I’ve tried every trick I can think of to keep my task list open and at-hand, including Dock icons, setting it as my browser home page, and even the nifty WebDesktop application.

But thanks to a comment here on 43Folders, I discovered Fluid. The work of Todd Ditchendorf, Fluid allows you to create WebKit-based dedicated browsers for webapps. In other words, it makes a standalone app whose sole purpose is to connect to a speciﬁc website. This allowed me to create a Sandy application that lives in my Dock, and I don’t lose my place when opening web pages or surﬁng with Safari.

You can use Fluid with any web application of course, and there’s a Fluid Icons group on Flickr where you can get images to use with the app. Thanks to Rael at Values of n, I uploaded a Sandy-speciﬁc icon the other day, which you see in action in the screenshot above.

So far, the combination of Sandy and Fluid is working out quite well. Sandy is smart, easy to use, and reminds me of appointments via Twitter and SMS. Thanks to Fluid, my Sandy digest is omnipresent to keep me on task while at the computer. Give both of them a whirl and see if they don’t work well for you, too.

”Getting Sandy in my Face” was written by Gordon Meyer for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 20, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Sciral Consistency update: Remember flexible tasks

gordonmeyer — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 13:35:23 -0500

Sometimes surprises come from unexpected places. (Um, I guess that’s part of why they’re surprising.) Case in point, yesterday I opened Sciral Consistency as I’ve done several times a day for the last ﬁve years. This time, however, something happened that hasn’t occurred since sometime in 2005. A notiﬁcation window announced that a new version of the application was available for downloading.

I seriously thought that it must be an error. I had just moved all my ﬁles to a different computer and perhaps a bit or date stamp got munged,. But, no, there really is a new version. I, and some other Consistency users, thought the application had been abandoned, but now there’s a shiny new Universal Binary version. (There’s also a new version of Windows users.) It’s like Christmas before Thanksgiving! But in a good way.

If you’re not familiar with Consistency, it’s a useful way to keep track of re-occuring tasks that need to be done regularly (or, ahem, consistently) but not on a ﬁrm schedule. For example, Consistency reminds me that I need to water the house plants every 3 to 5 days, clean the Ionic Breeze air ﬁlters approximately once a week, and that my dog, Scooter, needs his nails trimmed approximately monthly. For more on using Consistency, see Merlin’s post from 2004 and a related post at my blog.

”Sciral Consistency update: Remember flexible tasks” was written by Gordon Meyer for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Clippings intelligently convert "stuff" into OmniFocus tasks

Merlin — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 12:13:29 -0400

[Disclosure: I’m a volunteer contributor on the development of the OmniFocus app]

You could be forgiven for being exhausted by my harangues about the importance of putting actions into their own special place outside of email, web sites, or other action-bearing media (“Email is just a series of tubes,” Senator Ted Stevens, might one day say).

In fact, liberating actions from the email in which they arrived and putting them into a system that you trust is arguably the most important tenet of Inbox Zero. But it’s also advice that leaves a lot of people scratching their heads: “OK, big shot, so where do I put this new task, and how exactly is it supposed to get there?”

Well, I’m happy to say that recent sneaky peaks of OmniFocus now have a pretty neat way to help with this problem. It’s called “Clippings,” and if you’re familiar with the similar feature in OmniOutliner, you can imagine how it might work in the context of a task-tracking app and the complementary apps whose contents you want to direct to it.

Alongside the recently-added Perspectives, this is a feature that is making me very happy right now.

Once lightly conﬁgured, via the OF Preferences, Clippings allow you to select text and images from inside most OS X applications and send it to the OF QuickEntry box, where it gets munged into an inbox task automagically.

My favorite way to use this right now is inside Mail.app and alongside Scott Morrison’s wonderful MailTags plugin.

Let’s say I get a message from my client, Thorstenson Finlandson, containing some bit of work that he wants me to do.

See how I selected some of the text? Now I select “[Mail] > Services > OmniFocus: Send to Inbox” (n.b.: you can also deﬁne a system-wide key command for this in OF Preferences). And, waa-lah, the selection gets sent to my OF QuickEntry box.

Note that the message Subject is the default name of the task, the selection is added as a “Note,” and (this is huge) the sender’s email address is added as a link, as well as an URL that points me back to the original message (thanks for that one, MailTags!).

Since Thorstenson thoughtfully used an awesome subject line, I’ll need only a bit of light editing and the addition of a few task details to turn this into a real thing.

I hit “Save” and I’m good to go. Back in OmniFocus, I’m ready to get to work:

All that note stuff I added is safely shunted away in its currently-hidden ﬁeld, but I can bring it up any time by selecting the task row and hitting “CMD-[apostrophe]” or by clicking the “Expand Note” icon on the far right.

Happily, this works right out of the box in many other popular OS X apps (I’ll go out on a limb and guess that it works in most Cocoa apps that play nice with OS X Services; feel free to correct me). But this already feels like a really healthy, Quicksilver-like habit to me. I love a) that it’s super-fast, and b) that I keep that wonderful link back to the item the task came from. Disco.

Could I do things like this inside a Single Heavyweight Application? Yes, probably. But, personally, that’s not my gig. I love Mail.app for email, Safari for web browsing, NetNewsWire for feed reading, and so on. I’ve chosen a series of super-sharp paring knives over one monstrous Swiss Army Knife, because, frankly, that’s just how Daddy rolls.

I love how Clippings capitalizes on standard OS X technologies to lightly glue things together for me, regardless of my app preference. Personally, I don’t need a massive robot to try and do a bunch of thinking for me; I just need a few very simple tools that shorten my path from cognition to completion.

Anyhow, as you can see, I’m a little giddy about this and wanted to share it with you guys. If you’re in on the sneaky peak, be sure to give Clippings a spin (along with the hugely useful Perspectives). If I may say, my OmniGroup friends are doing a swell job on what feels to me like a very solid and non-ﬁddly app.

Rumor

A little bird tells me that a certain fast-talking new OmniGroup employee with hip glasses and a buzz cut may soon have a new OmniFocus screencast for you. Watch this space later this week for details.

[Again with the disclosure: I’m a volunteer contributor on the development of the OmniFocus app]

”Clippings intelligently convert "stuff" into OmniFocus tasks” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 15, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 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 ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

How to use a single Mail.app Archive (without losing your mind)

Merlin — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 07:36:29 -0400

For some time now, I’ve encouraged people to consider abandoning the byzantine folder structure that most of us used to employ to “organize” our email. In fact, this kind of functional simplicity is something I’ve started to think of as a pillar of Inbox Zero.

In addition to helping explode the myth that most email messages have any life once their actions have been liberated, it’s a healthy habit to actively remove any unnecessary systematic ﬁddling that doesn’t handsomely pay back the effort that habitually goes into it.

And, as ever: yes, some of you – because of the incredibly unique nature of your work in an ofﬁce – will need to have 500 taxonomic mailboxes, a monthly archives by project, a person-by-person collection going back to 1983, and a multiply-copied CC’d team archives, coded by color and identiﬁed with helpful icons you found on Gopher in 1992. Sure, why not. If that’s working for you, by all means, keep ﬁddling and ﬁling.

But, if you’re ready to admit you might be turning a crank that’s potentially not hooked-up to anything, here’s my four favorite ways to leverage the intelligence of Mail.app for drop-dead simple archiving.

[also, some prior art from April: Some handy Mail.app Smart Mailboxes]

1. Regular Old Search

An astonishing amount of email can be found with nothing more than a search on “From,” “Subject,” or the occasional “Entire Message.” If you just need to see whether you’ve ever gotten email from a person, this is the easiest and fastest way. In fact, I can’t think of a way to even do this with regular mailboxes, so score one for Search.

What you’re not doing: Maintaining an insane collection of by-person manual mailboxes. I’ve heard of people who get a message that went to ﬁve people, then manually copy it to ﬁve folders – one for each of the recipients. People like this need more work and, possibly a Ritalin. (See also below: Address Book Group Smart Mailboxes)

2. Smart Mailbox: Date Ranges

A Smart Mailbox for email you’ve received in the last 3 days will cover so much of your basic archive-retrieval needs – meaning the times when you actually will need to see archived email (versus your elaborate fantasies about the day 10 years from now when you theoretically cover your ass and embarrass everyone you hate). Winnowing of this kind not only makes for faster scanning, but it will greatly speed up sorting and searching, of course.

My “Sent in the last 4 days” Smart Mailbox also gets a big workout, as well as “To Respond – 2 days” which is any email I’ve received in the last 2 days and ﬂagged for response.

What you’re not doing: Building a rabbit hutch that requires you to manually drag crap into folders where the contents will die within a few days. A Smart Mailbox knows how to keep things fresh and avoids the need for unnecessary metawork and “thinking.”

3. Smart Mailbox: Address Book Groups

It’s mindblowing to me that even some power users don’t know about this time-saver. You can create manual or Smart Groups in Address Book that are then exposed for Smart Mailboxes in Mail.app

Ideas for this?

clients on a project (Smart Group with shared Company name)
friends in your city (Smart Group with shared City or area codes)
colleagues at a remote ofﬁce (Smart Group with shared Company name or email domain AND City/State)
Family (Smart Group with shared family surnames + names of in-laws, etc.)

Related: I’d also suggest making a new person-based Smart Mailbox any time you ﬁnd yourself corresponding a lot with a new person, especially if it’s on an urgent project that will likely sunset in the next little while. Work, work work, and then when your exchanges slow down, just delete the Mailbox and you’re done. No need to re-re-re-organize.

What you’re not doing: Again, you’re not struggling and fussing over where stuff goes in order to keep access easy. You can trust that all your stuff is one single location, then just let Apple’s magic do all your heavy lifting.

4. Smart Mailbox: Tagged Messages

With a plug-in like Mail Tags you can easily add simple taxonomic terms for the kind of messages that you used to ﬁle by hand. But, seriously: keep it as simple as you can possibly stand. Maybe even down to a few really basic categories for all non-actionable & reference email.

Orders & Receipts
Tracking Numbers
Accounts & Passwords
Yay Me: Compliments and Résumé-builders

What you’re not doing: No longer ﬁddling with a hierarchical maze in order to know your login and purchase info can be pulled up when you eventually need it.

The Acceptable Exception: Really Old Mail

Depending on your life and work, you might want to consider archiving (as in removing to a backup someplace) any mail that’s more than a couple years old. This should speed up your searches a bit, and will certainly improve the quality of any search-based results.

But if it’s important to you to keep this around, maybe create an “Annual Archive” mailbox, with manual sub-folders for all mail received in each given year. I’m not sure how much this buys you from a semantic standpoint, but my suspicion is that it might be kinder on Mail’s resources to not have a single, bajillion-item mailbox (any Apple pros want to chime in?).

As with all this stuff, YMMV. But consider whether the effort you put into ﬁling pays off often enough to be worth the hassle. In my experience, it’s no contest: smart wins.

So, anything I missed? Got a Smart Mailbox that saves your ass from ﬁddly archiving?

”How to use a single Mail.app Archive (without losing your mind)” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 16, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

TaskPaper: Simple, text-based task management

Merlin — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 09:48:09 -0400

TaskPaper

Jesse Grosjean from Hog Bay Software has just begun sharing the ﬁrst releases of a new task-tracking app which adopts a refreshingly stripped-down approach to managing action on a Mac. TaskPaper starts with the simplicity of text ﬁles then adds just a bit of Mac magic to make it both smarter and prettier, but without giving up portability and ease of use. Jesse says:

TaskPaper makes it easy to create a list of your projects and their tasks so that you always know what needs to be done. It’s simple to reorganize the list, create new items, mark items as done, and delete items that your ﬁnished with. You can also assign contexts (such as “home”, “ofﬁce”, or “car”) to your tasks so that you can later generate lists of all tasks assigned to a speciﬁc context.

As Gina Trapani has shown, there’s clearly a place out there for a smart, text-y task app. What a lot of folks need is not the taxonomical rabbit hutch of The Big GTD App™ – they just need an easy way to structure tasks in a non-ﬁddly way. TaskPaper’s easy tagging and ﬁddle-resistant stoicism could make it a go-to app for the overwhelmed knowledge worker (who’s not quite ready to make the leap into the shell).

This is very young software, and Jesse assures us that it still needs some TLC before being ready for battleﬁeld usage (context views are being balky, for one). But, I’ll be keeping an eye on this, and – if you struggle with rethinking your workﬂow around over-engineered productivity apps – I encourage you to grab a copy.

If you do this stuff long and diligently enough, you eventually learn that when it comes to “task lists” you need to focus a lot more on the “task” than the “list” (cf.). I’m always encouraged to see an app that honors that arrangement from the get-go.

”TaskPaper: Simple, text-based task management” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 03, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Managing actions from list emails?

Merlin — Mon, 30 Jul 2007 06:43:49 -0400

Inbox Zero Tech Talk
7/23/2007
00:58:38

During the Q&A portion of my Inbox Zero presentation at Google the other day, an audience member stumped me with a question about how to manage action around mailing list distributions (the question starts at about 48:22).

He said he frequently receives email requests and questions that are also distributed to the other 20 people on his team. He describes a “waiting game” in which team members hang back to see if other people will respond ﬁrst – at least partly out of not wanting to duplicate effort or ﬂood the sender. I thought it was a really intriguing question, although I said (and still believe) that distributed email would not personally be my ﬁrst choice to handle this kind of communication.

Well, based on the reaction in the room that day, I gathered that this is a common dilemma for Googlers. Funny thing is that, since the video went up, I’ve received a lot of email from people outside the Googleplex who share the same problem – a few of whom were aghast that I wasn’t aware what a huge pain this is for knowledge workers. And to an extent, I’ll admit those folks were mostly right.

I do know about the pain of being on multiple email lists, and it’s why I’ve spent the last ten years trying desperately to stay off of them. I also know and dread the poorly-worded action request that requires vivisection with a magnifying glass and tweezers.

But I suppose I never really thought about the cumulative effects that distribution lists can have across a company – especially given the geometric nature of their inﬂuence, and especially if some 500 emails a day must be monitored and processed for potential action items. That’s just stunning to me.

So: open thread for you email veterans to chime in…

How does your team handle these sorts of distributed requests? How are you personally managing possible actions that stem from email distributions? Are there success stories for the distributed email approach? Anyone found better media than email for managing this stuff? Do we all just need to make our peace with getting 2,000 interofﬁce emails a week, and move on? What’s the solution?

”Vox Pop: Managing actions from list emails?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 30, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Vox Pop: Implementing GTD for Creative Work?

Merlin — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 07:41:05 -0400

creativepro.com - Getting Design Done

Interesting article here by our old pal, Keith Robinson, introducing GTD to creative types. This is a fascinating topic for me, particularly since I sometimes ﬁnd it difﬁcult to “crank widgets” when it comes to anything creative.

Keith’s an old hand with this stuff, so it’s not surprising that he’s developed his own tweaks for Getting Creativity Done. Here’s a novel idea:

Create a creative time and space for yourself. Make sure it’s free of distraction and get into the habit of going there as often as you can. When there, pull out your @creative lists and get to work. I ﬁnd this is a great way to tackle smaller creative problems. It’s how I come up with – and get started on – most of my writing. This article is a result of my @creative time.

That’s an interesting way to think about contexts. Ordinarily, you’d think of contexts as representing access to a certain kind of tool or as a physical or temporal limitation, whereas Keith is using it almost like a project.

This is challenging stuff that my buddy, Ethan, and I end up talking about all the time. We both agree that you can use GTD to “clear the decks” for creative work – to move aside all the mundane workaday tasks that might keep you from focusing on blocks of time for creative stuff. But we, like a lot of people, both struggle with how (or even whether) to put truly creative work into our GTD systems. What do you think?

How are you using GTD for creative work? What do projects and next actions look like for a painter, a screenwriter, or a dancer? What’s your best trick for getting creative stuff done?

”Vox Pop: Implementing GTD for Creative Work?” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 27, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Neatorama on sustainable email fu

Merlin — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 09:29:47 -0400

Rule the Web (and Rule Your Email Inbox!)

Alex from the always-swell Neatorama has written up the bullets on his preferred method for keeping an email inbox at zero.

4. Have a Simple Filing System
Don’t overthink this: a complex folder with subfolder system is not what you need to remain organized. Obviously, your particular needs will dictate how many folders you have … but in my experience, you rarely, if ever, need subfolders.

5. Have a Follow Up Folder There will be times that I need to research an answer to a particular email or do something before I can reply. I let these emails sit in my inbox for a maximum of 1 day (gasp!), then they get put into a Follow Up Folder if I haven’t gotten around to them - and then I add an entry in my to-do list.

Good tips, and my only (seemingly omnipresent) comment is to underscore that need to empty all your baskets regularly. Hence, one beneﬁt of keeping your email storage and action structure light is that you won’t have to dash around to multiple places to see what’s on your plate.

”Neatorama on sustainable email fu” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 10, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"