Can't figure out the hand off between email and to do list

moonbeamstrio

Registered
Hi All,

I am fairly new to GTD - i have read David's book, and been watching YouTube videos, and diving into this forum.
One area I am struggling with, a week in, is how to smoothly handle the hand-off between email (apple mail) and my to do list program (trying out to-doist premium).

Background
I get a lot of email for work, 200 emails a day minimum normally. A lot is conversation, but a lot is small tasks, and sometimes, big projects. I have been massively struggling with handling this over the years, remembering what I have to do, and losing/missing tasks.

GTD Process
I have set my email (apple mail) up with multiple files, as David suggests and also a Waiting for, and To do, folder, as David suggests. I also have todist set up with the 10 context suggested (Agendas, Anywhere, Calls, Computer, Errands, home, Office, Waiting, Someday, Projects).

The confusion
Where I become confused is I now have two separate pieces of 'mission control' software in effect, doing a similar thing. As. understand it, David operates with email acting as it's own world and a separate task manager, as I am.
What I can't work out is how I should handle an email when it comes in - should I be collecting it on my email and handling it on my email and thus keeping the whole task on Apple mail, or should I be adding an extra step and handing it over to do ist? So in effect one of these 2 options:

1. Process email on apple mail. 2. Go to email in apple mail folder, then send it into Todoist) and then use Todoist as my mission control.

or

2. Keep Email and Todoist lists separate. And switch between them independently . If this, how do I decide which to work from, and when?

or

3. something else....


Any thoughts here would be much appreciated. I have searched for other topics, but not found an answer that I could relate to, and desperately searching for clarity

Many thanks
 

ivanjay205

Registered
I think your issue is that you are in two systems.... I too get a lot of daily email and requests, they key is to have ONE SYSTEM to organize your next actions. I would recommend Todoist in your workflow. So think of email as another "inbox" to collect things, but process them quickly and move them out of there..... Here is what I do:

I have a "Workday Startup" routine in which I empty my inbox. Any emails I need to act on I just forward to my email for my collection system. I use FacileThings and I can forward the email to inbox@facilethings.com and it shows on my account in my capture phase. I think ToDoIst has a feature to email into it also. Another part of my morning activity is to Clarify so for me in FacileThings, for you in Todoist, go through and apply context, timing, assign to projects, etc. and organize it in Todoit. I move the email to a subfolder under inbox called Pending NA. I know those are emails sitting in my Next Action List and this way when I am ready to handle them I can respond to the original email, but it is out of my inbox and thus not clogging my mind....

I have a very similar setup for end of day where I can clean out my email, review my calendar, clarify, etc. I try (very hard to do) to only check my email 2-3 times a day in between this and work out of FacileThings for me, Todoist for you, to knock things off those lists.

I find that by doing this in a disciplined way I do two things:

1. Most importantly, I stop being a slave to my email. I have a really bad habit of tackling incoming emails first in lieu of handling my Next Action List
2. I have trained people (since I share with my colleagues my system) not to expect an answer immediately. I am a COO so it is critical I control my own calendar and most of my team has respected that. In turn they know an email to me is "going on my list." They equate it to getting a landing slot at a busy airport at this point, it is kind of funny. But they trust, as I do, that every single thing will be responded too based on my priorities of the day.

And when an emergency pops up, I can focus on it and know my system is intact.
 

moonbeamstrio

Registered
Thankyou. This is a better explained version of something I could see in my mind but not quite articulate. I have just discovered the email to function in Todoist, and think that might be a worthwhile step to forward messages. My only hesitation is adding in an extra step, as looking at an email is easier for the most part than describing its contents to a list. This would be especially time consuming in the 'waiting' section, as I am often watching many many small tasks take place that I am overseeing by other staff, which I need to track, but do not want to dwell on with too much context.

I am also interested in the fact you receive as much communication to me, and suffer from a problem I have always suffered from whenever I have (many many many times) tried to implement to do lists- that I end up living in my email rather than the to do list and thus always prioritise incoming emails over defined tasks.
Checking my email 3 times a day is probably impossible for me, as so much of my job requires my quick responses and decisions. I need to find a way to carve out time to get back to my other actions.

Thanks again for your thoughtful, helpful suggestions.
 

TesTeq

Registered
I get a lot of email for work, 200 emails a day minimum normally. A lot is conversation, but a lot is small tasks, and sometimes, big projects. I have been massively struggling with handling this over the years, remembering what I have to do, and losing/missing tasks.
This really makes me think. If you were able to survive losing/missing tasks, GTD can overwhelm you since the system will remember all these tasks. It can really stress you out. You will have to consciously decide NOT TO DO many things - the things that you were losing/missing before GTD. What do you think, @mcogilvie?
 

Gardener

Registered
I don't use email as a task list, UNLESS the emails are in a totally rote format. For example, if my job included handing out user privileges to a computer system, and the user requests came to my email, each request in precisely the same format, I might filter those to a folder and treat that as a task list.

Though even then, those emails would really be project support material for a project, in my regular GTD lists, with something like a repeating reminder to, "Fulfill user privilege requests."

Otherwise, I extract tasks from emails and put them in my GTD list manager. Emails, for me, are just too messy to use as a task list--one email can contain multiple tasks, one task can have multiple associated emails, and I often have to read the mail in order to remind me of what task it actually represents, which means I'm reading far too many emails far too often.
 

moonbeamstrio

Registered
This really makes me think. If you were able to survive losing/missing tasks, GTD can overwhelm you since the system will remember all these tasks. It can really stress you out. You will have to consciously decide NOT TO DO many things - the things that you were losing/missing before GTD. What do you think, @mcogilvie?

You have well articulated my workflow better than me. This is absolutely correct - as I operate in a managerial role I can often survive missing tasks as someone else will likely pick it up, and I have an intuitive (but often wrong) mental system of categorising what is and what isn't important, but whilst I can often overlook something, I sadly always need to know all the details of how it is being done and be aware of who is handling it - if that makes sense. My team look to me for answers and if I dont know the detail, I look disorganised.

This presents me with a problem whereby I need to have freedom to focus on the bigger picture which is my actual job, yet also be acutely aware of all the detail. If many many small tasks are occurring, just recording their detail alone is incredibly time consuming - my waiting for box for example, quickly swells , but is also just as quickly irrelevant and needs updating as others process tasks. The movement of emails back and forth between an email program, a to do list, and the process of re-categorising them, changing titles etc. will be quickly overwhelming .
 

mcogilvie

Registered
This really makes me think. If you were able to survive losing/missing tasks, GTD can overwhelm you since the system will remember all these tasks. It can really stress you out. You will have to consciously decide NOT TO DO many things - the things that you were losing/missing before GTD. What do you think, @mcogilvie?
Well, a lot of people do freak out at one point or another when they see that big inventory of stuff. COVID-19 has led to more work email for me, and for months I was reading more because of the unprecedented situation. Now the arrival rate of new important information has diminished. I had to remake the decision to reduce the attention paid to email from certain sources. The time for increased processing is needed elsewhere.
 

moonbeamstrio

Registered
Well, a lot of people do freak out at one point or another when they see that big inventory of stuff. COVID-19 has led to more work email for me, and for months I was reading more because of the unprecedented situation. Now the arrival rate of new important information has diminished. I had to remake the decision to reduce the attention paid to email from certain sources. The time for increased processing is needed elsewhere.

This is something I'm keen to reflect in my system - if I log every single response/waiting for in email, I will likely NEVER get to larger tasks.
A 'reply if it takes less than 2min' email comes often for me. Even though these are important things to log, my concern is how I dont lose precious opportunity to tackle bigger jobs and get 'stuck' in my email program all day.
 

Oogiem

Registered
I get a lot of email for work, 200 emails a day minimum normally.
That's a pretty normal numebr of emails to me. My daily totals range from 150-300. So I don't see the volume of email as the issue.

I have set my email (apple mail) up with multiple files, as David suggests and also a Waiting for, and To do, folder, as David suggests.
HMM. I guess I never followed that or missed it. I also use Apple mail but I have the following as folders:
  1. Inbox
  2. Action Support (this is actually currently only for reporting software bugs and the answers when I am waiting for support I really need to rename it.)
  3. Reference
  4. Ads and Newsletters
  5. Order Info
  6. Order Rcvd
  7. TDRC (For emails realted to an organization where I am on the Board of Directors)
  8. ABWMSA (For emails related to an organization where I am on the Board of Directors)
  9. Spam (I use Spam Sieve but I still read through all ym spam mails every day. I still get lots of false positives in Spam and have topull them back and handle them. I never allow server side spam filters after losing far too many actually important mails that way.)
And that's it.

I use 2 other SW packages. DEVONThink for my digital tickler file, digital project support material , someday/maybe lsits and lots of small bits of reference I need on all my devices and Omnifocus as my task manager.

Of you choices I use

3. something else....

I never treat emails as an action. At best they are project support but generally any actions are buried in lots of other stuff. So when I handle an email I look through it for the tasks that are in it and add them as separate items in my OF system. Sometimes I can copy and paste the action but very rarely. No one ever sends them in a standard format, or there may be things related to 3-4 different projects in one email along with a lot of fluff and irrelevant material. I don't want to do procesing twice which is what happens if I dump the email to my Omnifocus inbox. I also always save to downloads folder any attachments and dealw ith them separately. Leaving attachments in email has been a recipe for disaster for me when I try to find them again. Attachments need tobe handled in their own system.

Waiting for is never an email. I can always put something like waiting for sheep ship date from X in my Sell sheep to X project. I might get that info via email (usually) but maybe not. Putting the waitting for explicitly in my task list for the project I'm waiting for is better.

Once I process an email by extracting out the useful bits into OF by hand I then file it in Reference. That way I can always get back to it if I need to and my inbox is clear. Once a month I clean out the emails form the same month a year ago by importing them all into a separate DEVONThink Databse that is my email archive. I do that because I was running into problems with Apple mail because I have emails going back over 20 years and yes, I do refer to them often. My archive database contains hundreds of thousands of messages and Apple mail just cannot handle that and search effectively.

If the email is about some event in the future I will drag a copy into my DEVONThink tickler folder system. I can then file the original email as normal. When I work with my tickler system once the event has passed or if I decide not to attend I can just delete it in DT and not worry that I've lost the historical info of the trail of emails. That’s also what I do for emails I want to re-thnk about some time in the future. There are very few of these. I have only 38 in there right now and that covers all the rest of this year and well into next year.

One big help in all this is aI have a bunch of rules that sort our ads, newsletters and other stuff that come in via email, that I want to see occasionally but not always. Right now I have about 200 of them. They sort the incoming mails that fi the criteria into the ads and news folder that I can review wheneever I am looking to buy soemthing and want to see if I have a coupon or when I have time to read the newsletters. Periodically I just dump them all into trash, none are critical to me. I clean out my email trash very couple of days or the sytem bogs down. I try to clean it out as soon as I've got several thousand emails in there.

Also, I use POP mail not IMAP so my mail is only on my machine once I pull it off the server. I want that complete control over my emails. I never handle or process email on my phone or tablet. I am not effective or efficient when I do that so I just don't.

Anyway, that's how I handle a similar mail volume with Apple tools.
 

James M

Registered
Can I throw something else in that I don't think is otherwise covered? One way of looking at your incoming email is as another Inbox - which means that as you process each item you ask the clarifying questions, "what is it?" and "is it actionable?". When you are sitting down in a processing-email-mode, you can use this time to work through the items and clarify as you would with your physical inbox.

As with any other item you are processing from an inbox, it may be trash, it may be for later, it may be reference only - or it may contain something for me to do.

Something I have discovered I need to do with email is actually figure out what the next actions are for me. The sender might not have specified. What do I actually need to do as a result of this email? If there are one or more next actions, I process this into next actions on my list as with any other item (including the URL of the email if I can), then file the email. If the next action is really just to reply to the email (perhaps to answer a question), I file it in an ANSWER folder within my email which I process out usually at least once a day, sometimes more.

As usual the 2-minute rule applies when processing - if it takes less than 2 minutes to do the next action you've defined, why not get it done? Equally if the reply would take less than 2 minutes, just send it off, and the email's gone.
 

cfoley

Registered
Here is my email process.
  • I put my email on the left of the screen and my list manager on the right.
  • I process, reply to and archive each email.
  • I close my email.
Elaborating on my second step:
  • A lot of email warrants no action or reply so I just archive it.
  • If only a reply is needed, I do it there and then.
  • If I need to add something to a list, I do it there and then, and also reply so the sender knows my plan.
Forwarding emails to my list manager for round two of processing does not work for me. Neither does allowing all my email to enter my list manager.
 

alteredbeast

Registered
Here is my email process.
  • I put my email on the left of the screen and my list manager on the right.
  • I process, reply to and archive each email.
  • I close my email.
Elaborating on my second step:
  • A lot of email warrants no action or reply so I just archive it.
  • If only a reply is needed, I do it there and then.
  • If I need to add something to a list, I do it there and then, and also reply so the sender knows my plan.
Forwarding emails to my list manager for round two of processing does not work for me. Neither does allowing all my email to enter my list manager.
I follow a similar process. Interested to know if you file your email if it is reference material for a task, or do you leave it in your inbox?
 

cfoley

Registered
I don't really file it. I just move it all out of the inbox and into one big folder. All of it, even the stuff I don't need to keep.

Search helps me find old emails.

When I know I will need an email on a specific day, I usually star the email. If a trip is coming up, for example, I will star emails containing flights, hotel reservations, event tickets, itineraries, etc.

Occasionally I will refer to an email from a support or reference document, either with a URL or by referring to the sender and date.
 
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