I want to keep everything else out of my brain and my system won’t let me forget it at the appropriate time. I only want to see the stuff I should be working on today. In an effort to limit my time managing tasks and focus on the work instead, I want to hide stuff I don’t need to do right now.Thus, I’ve got three buckets of tasks: (a) stuff with a specific date to work on it…(b) stuff that I need to work on but no specific date…and (c) stuff I want to do out in the future at some point but I don’t want it cluttering my task list every day.I see (a) and the (b)s from today or before on my main task list…the (b)s for tomorrow or beyond don’t bother me until it’s time…and the (c)s are totally hidden and I scan them once a week and might move one or two into the (a)s if need be.Perhaps I’ve made this sound complicated, but to me, it’s simple. Thanks for the screen shot.Now they need FAR better tools than that little pop-up window for organizing tasks. That’s awesome that the related e-mail functionality is there. Multiply this x30 or x50 and it became impossible to manage by memory.So do you just have a super-human memory and the rest of us are doomed? □ I also have no way to prioritize which ones are most important to deal with. So I create a task, ctrl+drag the e-mail as an attachment to the task, and write “Respond to customer and brainstorm new UI design” as the task title and hit save.If I hadn’t have done that, I’d have to re-read and reinterpret the e-mail multiple times. Then I need to come up with a way to simplify the screen and forward that to the engineers.I don’t have time to do that right now, because it will take about 10-15 minutes to do. I need to grab a few screen shots, write a few instructions and reply back. Upon reading the e-mail, it’s clear the customer is trying to report a bug in the software, but is confused. □ My problem with using e-mail as a task list is that I’m wasting major brain cycles reinterpreting these e-mails over and over again.For example: I had an e-mail from a high-level customer with a subject line “hey there” and the e-mail is three or four paragraphs long. I’m not trying to convince you to use tasks, but rather figure out if you’ve discovered some amazing way to do this. Send and archive is so awesome but I do a lot of send and delete too.Ĩ) Gmail is life changing. I do scan a lot of email on my blackberry.ħ) I still would like a send and delete button from gmail. It simply means I've got 500 emails to get through.Ħ) I've largely given up on responding to anything other than urgent emails and disqus comments on my blackberry. If you send me an email looking for a meeting, expect a few questions back from me first.ĥ) Just because my reply is short does not mean I have no interest. If you have not heard back from me in over a week, please resend your email.ģ) Short and sweet gets a faster response than long winded.Ĥ) I like to have conversations via email. Sometimes in my haste to delete spam, I delete a few legit emails. I do try to respond to all legitimate non-spam email and do a pretty good job at it.Ģ) I am not perfect. So for those of you who email me from time to time, here are some suggestions:ġ) Be patient. That's how I get to 500 unread emails and that's why I spent my sunday mornings in my inbox. I let the rest build up in my inbox and try to get to it on the weekends. Gmail knows who these people are and I can't for the life of me understand why they don't build a tool to source up all of those emails automatically. I try to get to all of those at least once a day and ideally twice or three times a day. Then I scan my inbox for emails from my top priorities wife, family, partners, colleagues, portfolio, etc. My email routine, now that I am solidly on gmail and loving it, is to quickly check off and delete all spam in my inbox at least once and ideally twice or three times a day. These were old unanswered emails, not spam (which I delete regularly in the ordinary course of business). I just spent four hours going through my inbox and taking it from 500 emails to zero.
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