My New Method for GTD Should Appeal to Inbox Zero Geeks

Posted by Creeva
August 8, 2008

Picture from here

I get distracted when I get home from work.  I’m easily amused and have the “Ooooooooooooooooooooohhh Shiny” mentality type of distraction.  I don’t deny it.   I don’t exactly revel in it either.   By the time I actually get around to doing some of the things I need to get done, it’s late, I’m tired and cranky.   If I put things off until the weekend we end up doing stuff and getting involved (”Is that a shiny over there?”) and so things once again get overlooked.   I’m not sure I would actually sleep if I didn’t know for certainty that it helps save my job and my marriage.   So what can I do about it?

Picture from here

Things I have tried with little or no success:

Nothing so far seems to work for me - I’m mundane blind.  When there is a shiny I don’t even notice the mundane.

Like many geeks, corporate types, etc.   I live and die by e-mail.   This is something I greatly increased in focus when I was a consultant.   Now I can handle literally hundreds of e-mails a day, and I can’t stand a cluttered mail box.  I normally use Gmail’s interface just through a browser, but I’ve been known to dabble in POP3 and IMAP access (the insanity!!).  Mostly though I just use the web browser.  It’s the same at work, home, and on the go.   The one thing I hate most about my mail box, is when it get’s full.   I hate a cluttered inbox, I hate coming back and seeing more then one page of e-mail waiting for me (which does happen if there is some strange reason I don’t check my email for two days).

Picture from here

So I stumble on the idea of combining these two things, hatred of e-mail clutter and a need to get motivated and GTD, so now I’m email my tasks to myself (and now Xie has joined into the game).  The first thing when I went down this road is to send myself a daily list of tasks to do, well I tried that once in the past and that doesn’t seem to help.  Neither do reminder services, since I easily dismiss them.

The format I use when I mail myself is TODO (task) - this forces me to stare at it every time I look at my e-mail.   I’m hoping it will succesfully burn the task into my brain.   When I actually complete the task it get’s archived, thereby saving me space in my inbox.   Too many tasks and it will roll over to a second page, I would be highly annoyed if that happened.   So essentially I’m going to be GTD by annoying myself.

Meh.

But it may work.

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