jack

Hm. My todo system is always going to be spread between a spreadsheet and an email client, since there's no point moving "reply to this email" into a spreadsheet when tasks naturally arrive categorised[1].

However, I just realised that I ended up with an "email so-and-so" section in spreadsheet and in email, and my "todo" mailbox also contained generic tasks to do something other than sending email. And that's stupid, it's a LOT better when I ruthlessly moved everything from the spreadsheet email section into emails with subject line "TODO: Email blah" and removed everything from "todo" email folder that was to do anything other than send an email, with specific tasks (not just "one para in this long email asks me to do... something") in the spreadsheet.

I realise I'm still unreliable in some ways, but I feel I have made progress at having stuff not just get lost, without devoting time to over-engineering a system that will never get used :)

Footnote [1]

A reminder: when an email is in the inbox, the task is to triage it: if it's short and requires no action or a very quick action, do that right then; if it's long or needs a long reply, move it to the "todo" folder; if it requires me to do something else, add the appropriate task to the spreadsheet. If it's in the "todo" folder, the task is, when I have time, read it, and write a response to it.

Other folders include:

"chat" -- I want to reply to this at some point, but only when I feel like some asynchronous social contact.

"waitingfor" -- I sent this email, but eventually want to check that whoever I sent it to got it and did whatever they were supposed to do, and do something else or poke them if not. If it's urgent, there's a reminder in my diary that if they haven't replied by "X" date, do something about it.

"LJ" -- notifications from LJ and some other non-email social networking sites. Occasionally stuff from here goes into "todo" if it needs a specific real-life response, else it gets starred if I just want to continue the online conversation.

I think I should have a folder for incoming mailing lists that I don't quite want to unsubscribe from, but I only really want to glance at the titles, so they get out of my inbox.