Swat At Airplanes

Over the past year I have been getting into "getting things done." Sounds buzzword-y. It is. I never really re-invented the way I do stuff, but after slowly reading www.43folders.com and Getting Things Done and adopting one change at a time, I think I have a light-weight, low-stress system for keeping track of all the "stuff" you have to do.

Capture everything in an inbox. All email dumps into one inbox. Voicemail I hate because you can't really track it so I usually ignore it. Everything I download from the internet goes into a folder on my desktop called "inbox" which I review and file away periodically. For physical mail if I need to keep it, I scan and shred it, otherwise I trash everything--with most banks and credit cards they have online statements if you want to look at them. For to do lists I have a list called "inbox" where I brain dump regularly.

Organize everything. All the reference "stuff" is filed away on my hard drive or with labels in email. All true actions are filed in the task list. No broad goals are allowed in the list--i.e., eat better, exercise more, be more charitable never make the list because I could
never really check them off. Delete everything else.

Labels in gmail. Everything gets a general label following the a.xyz format where a is the general category and xyz is the specific thing.
a = administrative
c = career
n = notes
p = projects
r = reference
s = school
w = workflow

Labels are only useful if you don't have to apply them. I set up filters so that, for example, all amazon.com receipts go directly to "r.shopping"--shopping receipts for reference--and bypass my inbox. All list-serves get filtered with an "a.del" label--stuff I can delete
later, which is an administrative thing. The first time I got an email from my Chinese professor, I make a filter for "s.chin211." "n.goals" is for eat better, exercise more, be more charitable. Anyway, a lot of the email gets sorted automatically, I have them for
later when I want to check them, rather than seeing tons of crap emails every day.

The only label that needs explanation is the workflow category. "w.someday" is for projects I want to get to, eventually, but realistically can't touch right now, like dressing in pink and taking over my local airport. "w.review" is for email I want to read again but I can't just have them hanging around my inbox--like maybe the email I wrote to myself to eat better, exercise more, be more charitable. "w.waiting" is a tag for important followups where I am waiting for a response. You get the idea.

If there is actually an action to do, it goes into the task list which is subdivided into lists like: inbox (for brain-dump), school, career, projects, social, prayer (things to pray about), people (people to think about), misc, and someday (which is really a kill bin in disguise). Stuff moves from inbox, to an appropriate list, and if it stays for a while, it goes into the someday list, and eventually gets deleted.

Then you just do it. I usually block out time to work on task groups--it tends to be easier to do 10 financial things at once, for example. If it is a repetitive thing, I will set up a recurring appointment on my calendar, with an email notification before I am supposed to do it. For example, I get an email from myself every morning to read the book of mormon. I don't necessarily do it in the morning (or ever), but I can't delete that email until I do it.

Anyway, with an iPhone I am always poking around my email inbox and task list whenever I have a free moment. Google stuff is pretty well integrated, simple, and free. I stay pretty much on top of things. The real innovation, however, was using a task list only for actions rather than goals, freeing myself from the dread of looking at my to do list. Now I get things done like nobody's business. Well, this post wasn't on my radar today, but whatever, I'm a work in
progress.