* Todo section is very similar to Mark for Review and I just add the 'Todo' label to emails when I can't deal with them immediately but plan on doing so in the near future. If Priority Inbox allowed me to add 5 sections instead of 4, I would just make Someday one of the section too and be done with it. Instead, I use the label 'Someday' and once a week or so, go through my Someday emails and star them if necessary. It's similar to their timelines feature but I don't have an easy way to say 'Remind me about this email in June'. * Calendar section is automated deadline-driven todos that must be done - paying bills, saying Happy B'days etc. It includes emails like Amazon shipments, work-in-process items, long email threads etc. * Starred are things I'm following until they are done - similar to the complete/incomplete feature they mention. I have for categories in my Inbox: Starred, Calendar, Todo, Everything else. I do something very similar with Gmail Priority Inbox + Google Calendar already but it's very slightly more work. The person emailing me doesn't have that context, and rarely has the consideration of it in the first place. Maybe the issue is that the person adding things to my to-do list knows my workload, my priorities. ![]() If I think of my inbox and assistant as a worker queue, it's their job is to keep incoming messages from being lost and disorganized, and in many cases, preparing the information/requests in the email for being worked on by me. That means that a pretty significant % of the non-spam emails I get are emails that need more work done to them before they're complete enough for me to do anything with them. I wouldn't give up the 20% of high quality email I get for the 80% of difficult to process email I get, but the 80% is still there. They're not forming complete thoughts, really asking for what they want/need, and in some cases, even asking anything at all. What it's lead to, though, is the impact of a lot of people who don't think about the work they're creating for someone before they hit send. This has paid off MASSIVELY and I wouldn't change that. ![]() That said, I've gotten some good mainstream press related to my projects and I've also gone out of my way to make myself available to people by sharing my time, experiences, and lessons learned. As your inbox volume increases, the % of things that come in that you don't want to become work for you also increases. > If you still do the work that emails contain, you still have a todo list other people can put things on, don't you? Take the work out of email, and put it where it belongs. He needs a lot of context for making smart calls, and for me, I need to trust him to make those calls.Įmail clients need work - a lot of work - but this is more than renaming the statuses of an email and showing me who I've emailed most recently with. My inbox is a strange dichotomy of a place that is private, but that anybody can send something into. Truthfully, the people who I've hired who work with my inbox I trust deeply. Of course - the problem with this workflow is that it requires another human. That is email nirvana, or as close as I'm willing to accept today :) Email is working for me instead of against me. End of story: it's easier to get more work done. This makes email 10000000x less painful, and makes my to-do list less like playing whack-a-mole. I'm pretty sure that has a similar workflow that I've read about here on HN, he may be able to comment more. turning emails that do need my attention into todo's means that I can work from a to-do list, or ideally the current day's to-do list with items prioritized onto it with the help of an assistant. ![]() This includes anything from FAQ to scheduling meetings, etc.Ģ) second line of defense is answering emails that only need an answer - usually nothing more than a sentence or two.ģ) everything else that's left in my inbox requires work. With credit to Amy Hoy (Freckle, 30x500, etc): I believe that the problem is that every email that comes into your inbox is painful because it is associated with an unknown amount of work, and you don't know the amount of work until you open and read it.Īmy's newest product, Charm, is a help desk tool built to solve THAT problem - fundamentally decoupling the processing of email from the work that those emails contain.ġ) first line of defense assistant does triage, cleaning out things that I don't ever need to see and either need deleting, or don't need my input. The problem with "email as todo", which is a habit I had to work very hard to train myself out of, is that it turns your inbox into a to-do list that others can put things on. I consider myself a reasonably high-volume email recipient (>400 actionable emails a day on average). This is exactly the OPPOSITE of what I want.
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