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Actions from emails
mcnicks | Apr 3 2006
I have been working on improving the organization of my emails and I have set up some folders for actionable stuff: @Action,for stuff that needs done; @Review, for stuff that may contain actionable stuff but needs more detailed reviewing to determine them and @Waiting, for emails that indicate that I am waiting for others to respond (mostly these are emails I have sent to other people, asking them to do stuff for me). This seems to be working well, but I think that it is not as 'GTD' as it could be. The emails in my @Action folder can lack clarity and often contain more than one action, which means that there may not be an single, obvious next action to take for each email. So I wonder whether, as part of my email processing, I should be taking time to extract actions from emails into my next action context lists? Sounds sensible, but I am not sure how to relate the actions that are produced back to the emails (particularly because I am swinging towards using lofi, paper and pen lists). What do you all do in this case? Should I consider my @Action, @Review and @Waiting folders as mini reference folders that I review at regular intervals? I am worried that I will end up with a system that I do not implicitely trust ("has that email been _totally_ dealt with?" / "is this action all I have to do wrt that email?" ...etc). Cheers, 3 Comments
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 I am using Outlook 2003...Submitted by mcnicks on April 3, 2006 - 9:16am.
I am using Outlook 2003 and Exchange for email and calendar but I am avoiding using the tasks because a) I know that Outlook tasks really annoy me and b) I want to be able to easily take my next actions lists with me to meetings, shops and so on. In fact, I would ditch using the Calendar too but my team and the rest of the staff use it to work out where I am (or, rather, where I should be). It may be that I am worrying too much. For 99 percent of the time, it may well be obvious whether emails with multiple tasks / contexts have been 'completed' or not just at a glance. I have not reached that level of intuitive planning and working yet, and I am still working on the whole 'trust my system' thing - hence all of the questions on here :) D » POSTED IN:
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