Hacker News Reader

Comment by urban_winter | Hacker News Reader

I've never found a way that I like to integrate dealing with email into a to-do list. Reading emails is a perpetual need but it is damaging to focus and I often find that it saps my energy by reminding me of all the things that are not yet done. I've tried having fixed times of the day where I always deal with emails; adding "30 minutes of email" to my task list; reading them between each switch of tasks. None of these approaches really cracked it for me. I haven't read "Getting Things Done" - I wonder whether it has a solution.

View on HN

Indeed it does! And the key lies in separating “defining work” from “doing work.” GTD’s “get clear” process involves going through everything in your inboxes (not just email but physical papers etc), and determining what is the actual _next action_ for this thing (if it’s actionable at all; some emails should just be referenced, delegated, or archived).

You log that next action in your system and move on to the next one, rather than doing the action t then and there (unless it’s super quick to do so).

By separating these two, you minimise mindset switching, and can be far more assured that you’re working on the right thing at any given time.

Yes, from my point of view, GTD does two things very right. One is separating the "defining work" from "doing work", the other is keeping contextualized task lists for "do this next time you are at that place, or meeting that person, or whatever".

And of course, both feel obvious in retrospect. I don't even remember if there is anything else in GTD, but the value I get from those is enormous.

I've found it helpful to deliberately identify if you are being the manager or the technician (to use E-myth's terminology). The manager goes through the lists of tasks and emails, and works out what needs to be done (next, or today, or this week, or this sprint). The manager tells the technician (usually via TODO list) what that task is. Then you switch modes to technician - its no longer your job to organise, its your job to do.

The solution I have pulled out of GTD is that once a day I clear everything out of my inbox, and anything that needs a reply gets put into a todo list. Slightly later in the day, I groom that Todo list, and work out which items I will today, and set aside 30m in which to do those. If there's an item in there that will take a significant investment in time -- including a certain email -- then I'll make an appointment on my calendar to do it.

I'll respond to interesting email that comes in during the day if I feel like it / if I'm bored, but knowing that once a day I do a complete clear-out is helpful to me

I agree with this, email (professional at least) inbox should be treated as its own todo list.

anything in the inbox is something to action, anything you don't need to action personally, archive / tag or move to a folder and be done with it.

If it's something to action then at least gmail has a snooze button and I've found that to be super helpful.

My rule of thumb is that I should not have more than 30 items in my inbox. If there's more then clearing the inbox takes priority over anything else (bar key meetings).

Have you ever thought about doing the exact opposite? Instead of integrating email in your todo list you could run your todo-list via email.

I worked on a job where this was done and it worked flawlessly (emails generated from various systems and people, including those in the shift before you).

The one thing you have to make sure that your "job" communication is divided from your private communication or other non-actionable messages like newsletters etc.

Writing Emails to your self is totally okay also : )

Email is exhausting. I've decided that I just don't care about quick turn-around on email. It sucks, but the cost of checking email throughout the day is too high - not just in terms of time, but the psychological impact of it is surprisingly negative.

I now check it ~2x. Morning and midday. If I'm doing a back and forth I may go back to that one specific thread, but that's it.

The issue is that you're likely leaving too much on your inbox. I use my inbox as a to-do list (especially before Gmail removed inbox and its reminders, now I just create a draft with a title) but it doesn't contain the backlog of all the projects I'm working on.

If you have too many tasks that needs to be done I think you should group them by activity and store them in a separate place. Then you can timebox "dealing with $activity" where you just get down with those tasks.

Eventually you can hire someone and give them the task of a certain activity (which can be anything: a software project, dealing with a visa application, buying a house etc)

At a certain point you have to be realistic about how long it takes to deal with email. No system is going to give you more time. You're either going to have to allocate more time to email, respond to fewer messages, or spend less time responding. Email is, unfortunately, an unpleasant part of the job for many of us. Some days it's better than cleaning toilets, so there's that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com