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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 recently changed the way...Submitted by sonia_simone on April 3, 2006 - 1:28pm.
I recently changed the way I handle these. I now go ahead & create an NA on my NA list (I keep a paper list, and simply scribble it on the page somewhere--this takes maybe 2 seconds), and then move the email item into the relevant folder. Current email folders are In Progress (with one subfolder per project), Action Support (for NAs that aren't big or complex enough to have a project folder), and Reference. When In Progress projects are completed, the whole folder goes into Reference, which makes things a little easier to dig out later if I need to. I used to have a Waiting email folder, and again, I changed that to put those items in the Waiting section of my NA list. I just wasn't checking both lists regularly enough, so I consolidated--well worth the small overhead of creating the items on the list rather than dragging & dropping in Outlook. I review and refresh my NA + Waiting lists daily, about an hour before I leave for the day. » POSTED IN:
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