types of actions
Another thing that I’d forgotten since the first time I read the GTD book: not everything that advances a project is a Next Action. Some actions are for the future (and hence belong on your calendar or tickler file); some actions need to be carried out by other people.
One concrete effect of this realization is that it gave me a way to flag the current status of all of my projects. I have a list of projects; each project has to have to have at least one item associated to it with the label NEXT, WAITING, or SCHEDULED. I may have multiple such actions, if I’m proceeding along multiple fronts; I may also have items on the project that don’t have any of those labels. (Those items might be ideas for future actions or reference materials.) But I have to have at least one item that’s flagged with one of those labels: if I don’t, that’s either a sign that it’s really a someday/maybe item, not a project, or that I need to sit down and come up with a next action on the project.
This also applies to e-mails. Some e-mails, even e-mails that I have flagged as active instead of archived, aren’t associated to a project; I stick these in a folder called ‘conversations’. But lots of my active e-mails are associated to a project. So I have folders ‘actions’, ‘waiting’, and ’scheduled’, corresponding to the labels above. (As well as another folder, ‘projects’, for reference material that I don’t want to archive just yet.) (Actually, not every e-mail in actions/waiting/scheduled is associated to a project in my formal project list: some of them are single-action projects that I don’t feel compelled to capture elsewhere. Though some may be few-action projects that really should be captured elsewhere? I don’t think it’s hurting me yet, though.)
The problem is that this requires too much work for some common operations. Say that an e-mail comes in that I’m waiting for. Then it’s a response to something that’s currently in my ‘waiting’ folder; to avoid forgetting that I’ve gotten the response, I typically move the response to ‘waiting’ as well, then (once I’ve finished clearing out my inbox), go to ‘waiting’, look for e-mails that have gotten responses, and characterize them accordingly. Another difficult issue is when an e-mail requires some amount of context to respond to entirely: do I just have a single message in my actions folder, or the whole thread?
I’m starting to think that gmail has gotten it right by replacing folders with (per-thread) tags. But I’m not willing to move even my personal e-mail usage to gmail’s web interface, and I certainly can’t move my work e-mail there. Does Thunderbird use tags, and make it easy to restrict your view to only messages with a certain tag? (Looking at the web page, I think so, but I’m not completely sure.)
For the time being, I am one of the eccentrics who reads e-mail using Gnus. I assume I’ll move off of it one of these years, but that time hasn’t yet come, and (despite Gnus’s folder-centric nature) I don’t think this will push me off of Gnus, either. I spent a few hours digging through the source code and asking questions of the newsgroup; Gnus doesn’t have tagging support, but it looks like it should be workable to add an extra header to saved e-mails and tell Gnus to limit its view to headers matching a certain value on that header. (A nice benefit of having a mail reader written in a scripting language.) I haven’t yet found the time to implement this, so there might be something that I’m missing, but I’m optimistic.
Once I’ve done that, I can get rid of the separate action/waiting/scheduled folders: those messages can all be in my projects folder, and I can add keystrokes to narrow my view to messages with a certain tag. Of course, this doesn’t solve the ‘response to waiting’ problem listed above; I may actually have my inbox be the same as my project folder. (I’m not sure what the effects of that will be.)
Even the current system is a big improvement over what my inbox used to look like. My actions folder never gets very big; when I got back from vacation, I had 50 e-mails in there when I was done with my inbox scanning, but that was an exception, and having those e-mails all in one place was very useful. (In particular, it allowed me to get it down to the normal 5-or-so level by the next day.) And the waiting and scheduled folders are useful views for periodic reviews. But it’s clearly an area where improvement is possible.
May 5th, 2008 at 11:26 am
I have the same problem you said in “for some common operations”. I often go to my @pending (your ‘waiting’) afterward, which is the same hassle you have.
May 26th, 2008 at 8:48 pm
[...] system is settling down pretty well. I’ve made peace with the e-mail sorting issues that I mentioned earlier; once I’d added short keystroke commands to file an e-mail as action/waiting/scheduled (along [...]