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When 90% of my emails contain my todos

Hi, I've been a fan of GTD and have been using/trying to apply it for over a year now. I have a problem but first let me explain what I do: I work as an International Sales Representative ie. Agent/Broker for some industrial products, that is, I'm a bridge (middle man) between buyers in my country and sellers from overseas (big factories). Some facts from within my job are:

  1. I work confirming orders, I probably handle over 40 at the same time.
  2. Each order has rutinary tasks, for example: it starts with an inquiry, then customer confirms, we give a number to it, we confirm to supplier, suppliers re-confirm, sends Proforma Invoice, customer makes advance payment, and from here every little task dealing with letters of credit, shipping lines, customs, etc.
  3. 90% of my email contain my tasks

Problems are several:

  1. I keep loosing track of pending projects (I don't like printed material around) and miss deadlines, not for project itself but for simple tasks related to them.
  2. Writing tasks down from every email is time-consuming and ends up being a really long todo list with everything to be done NOW!.
  3. I can't find a trustable system to store all this info from Purchase Orders. I also tried with a custom system but the time spent feeding it was longer than the time actually working on each order so I dumped it.
  4. I tried with pre-defined printed forms to follow-up orders but they soon pile up and turn difficult to handle.

To sum it up, I'm constantly getting behind with work, missing deadlines, neglecting important tasks from projects and hence, NOT getting things done.

Can anyone give me an idea on how can I start organizing this? It seems easy or reasonable at first but once started, it gets out of control.

Thanks.

Autarchist's picture

Here's a nice solution:

I think email based GTD is interesting stuff, I always wondered how it handled everything. Personally I am really into Mentat now as I've been using it for all my tasks and promoting it at work (so forgive my zealous posting!). It seems like this could be perfect for your situation:

If it's possible to get those suppliers and or customers using it too, it would be an ideal fix. You can set up shared projects for each order including who needs to know about it. This would let you separate and organize and also stay connected on responses. In each you can reassign tasks back & forth (with email notifications built in) to process them when needed for confirmations, then set it to "closed" when that task is done(That way its out of your list view, but you can still find it later if you need to.) That's pretty much how we operate with it at my work and it's really perfect for staying on top of things as a group.

Additionally, even if it's only you using Mentat, you can use the Agenda to drag what you need to do for a given day from any mix of those projects/orders and get a focussed view that you can handle from all that chaos (an 'eye in the task storm' if you will). Knock 'em out down that list then move em, comment or change their status, or close em. Once you've got space, you can look through the projects again to see what you can line up next. That's really handy for the way I use GTD.

Try it out at http://gomentat.com and see if it might work for your problem. I'd be happy to answer any questions too.

Good luck however you solve it!

 
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