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of open loops and non-concluded threads
terrence p | Jun 18 2007
Dear 43 Folderers I am curious to hear how folks deal with open loops, in particular, the open loops that are made out of those many, many emails you send out into the ether with ne'r a response to be had. I'm not talking about those cheesy "hey how you doing messages" either. No, I mean those important messages you send to your boss, or colleagues, or underlings that you need a response from. Important things like: to Personnel, what about that salary increase I filed a request for three years ago? or to the Big Boss, about all these huge equipment donations we're receiving? Yeah, we completely ran out of space to store them about six months ago. Where do you want me to store the new 100,000 square feet worth of new donations you're expecting next week?" I realize my query is part technology and part personality/communication skills. As for the latter, let me just say that I'm organized. I've got everything out in front of me, my ubiquitous capture device handy, and my trusted system running. But I guess what I realize is that trusted system running in the background isn't doing a very good job keeping me aware of my many, many open loops. A project manager's nightmare for sure. So from a technological standpoint, how are folks keeping their open loop flags in the air? I work mainly out of Mail.app and the only way I've been able to deal with this is by tagging each outgoing message with "follow up" (by means of employing MailTags) and creating a smart folder to look for those messages in my Sent folder. During my weekly review I look over this folder and it is pure misery. At what point do you stop listening to folks say "I'm sorry. there's so much to do and I'm just way too too busy" and start hearing "You suck. You're emails are unimportant to me?" Thanks. Any input would help. - - Aw nuts. Now I'm wondering . . . is anyone going to respond to THIS message? 6 Comments
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 re: Tacking Open Loops via EmailSubmitted by Todd V on June 18, 2007 - 8:13pm.
I've found that email is not the best way for me to track things but I'm still forced to use it. I know many friends who are using the MailTags add-on and find that tagging their emails works the best for them. For myself, however, I've been working mainly with the file system of the Mac OS for my entire GTD approach. I designed the Ready-Set-Do! program and just recently released the 1.2 version which has a new Mail rule I created that works with Mail.app. Here's how it works -- and how it relates to your question. When I delgate a task to someone else I can click a "Delegate To" button in Ready-Set-Do!. This makes a new outgoing email message in Mail.app with the subject line "< I also added a "Meeting with?" script to the new 1.2 version of Ready-Set-Do! that creates a TextEdit document with all of the agenda items and waiting fors connected with a person. So you can literally run this script, print out a list for a person, and when you get together with them you can say, "So?how's it going with X,Y,Z emails I sent you a few weeks ago?". I'm still working on getting the Demo version of Ready-Set-Do! available (should be ready this week). Currently the 1.2 funcitonality is only available to those who have already purchased an official copy of Ready-Set-Do!. Anyways. This is what's working for me. » POSTED IN:
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