@mcogilvie - curious about how you’ve incorporated Apple Mail, Reminders and Safari into your system for processing & reading. I, like you, use Apple Calendar (iCloud for personal, Exchange for work) and Things 3 for all projects/NA’s. I’ve recently started doubling down on Safari’s Reading List to store all reading material without a due date or that is not mission-critical to a project, and have added a “clean up Safari Reading List” task to my Weekly Review to avoid bottlenecking. Would love to hear how these tools have become part of your workflow, too.
I am using Safari’s reading list in the same way you are. It‘s all optional stuff. If somehow the list was lost, no big deal. Often the workflow is email to web browser to reading list. I don’t schedule or remind myself to look at it. I hit the reading list when I have or need a little downtime, read it and decide where to go from there. I‘ve tried Pocket and Instapaper, and they are too much trouble.
I‘ve moved several lists of things I might want to buy out of Things into Reminders. These are book lists, music lists, someday-maybe shopping. Again, no pressure to look at them unless I want to. While Reminders is not really a great tool for GTD, it’s more than adequate for this. I do not put serious someday/maybe here: Visit the Galapagos is still in my Travel Someday/Maybe in Things. It’s a project, and I’m serious about it, just not now.
One tip I would like to mention about Reminders and Apple Watch. In addition to our own grocery shopping, I am also buying groceries for my quite old but still spry mother in law. I put both lists into a combined list in Reminders before I shop. I use my watch to check off items, and I use it to pay at the checkout. When I return home, the watch gets washed along with my hands. My wallet, phone and keys never leave my pants pocket until I return home.
My email load has become pretty bad. I looked for ways to triage it, preferably before it got out of the Inbox. I’ve settled on flags. Apple mail on all devices allows different colored flags. They are easy to set, and they sync. Given unread email in my inbox, there are three things to do with it: delete it, act on it if under 2 minutes, or flag it. The flags I use are: red- must handle ASAP; orange- handle; yellow- waiting for; blue- calendar item; green- reading. If I handle only the red and blue flags on a given day then the world will be ok. Blue flags let me batch and make sure I don’t FIFO my way into a calendar jam. Yellow saves me the trouble of noting rapid email conversation waiting-fors in Things. Green-flagged items often link to web pages, which may or may not go on the Safari reading list. It’s working well. I see it as widget processing, with the added benefit of some info-snacking.