eMarkLee

Since I have been GSD’ing so well the past few weeks, I have neglected to blog. I have now added blogging to my list of things to do, so it has now been captured. Done.

The first thing I think anybody should do when implementing GSD is looking at emails. For every email that comes in, you should decide on what the next action is and file accordingly (I make action items into Outlook Tasks). I generally keep my Inbox empty at the end of the day, save for a couple of important emails that I want to bang out. Any email that you can respond to in 2 mins or less, just do it (JDI). Your decision should be: Do it, Defer it, Delegate it, or Delete It.

1. Create three folders, @ARCHIVE, @REVIEW, @ACTION, and @WAITING. The “@” sign puts these folders at the top.
2. From this point on, everything that goes into your Inbox goes into one of those folders. Let me describe in more detail here:

@ARCHIVE: Stuff you’re done with. Nothing in this list requires an action. If you need something from this bucket, just search for it.
@REVIEW: Stuff you should read. I’ve toyed with the idea of “@REVIEW_LATER” for the less important emails that you might want to read eventually but right now just have one. Nothing here is important…it’s for your viewing pleasure and when you have time.
@ACTION: I keep this folder mostly empty because I use Outlook Tasks to manage my tasks and drag emails into Tasks but I use this folder for important things for today that I will need to refer to.
@WAITING: This is pretty important. I have a separate trick that helps track emails that I will share later, but basically this is the folder to keep copies of emails that you have sent to people that eat your emails like fish & chips.

This works pretty well for work but I haven’t done it yet for personal email. We’ll see how that goes…