How categorise emails on iPhone?

L

Lizzie

Registered
Hi
My GTD system works well except for dealing with emails on my iPhone. I use Outlook for Windows and TaskTask but when I'm out of the office and handle emails I end up with stuff in my head as I can't categorise the email for next action.

How do other people overcome this?

Thanks in advance
 
If you can't handle e-mails totally on the phone then perhaps you need to change the context of when you do e-mail and not process them on the phone?

One of the rules for handling stuff is that you have all your tools available. If not then you can't really do that action with that device.

I would solve that problem by not using my phone to handle e-mail at all.
 
Oogiem said:
If you can't handle e-mails totally on the phone then perhaps you need to change the context of when you do e-mail and not process them on the phone?

One of the rules for handling stuff is that you have all your tools available. If not then you can't really do that action with that device.

I would solve that problem by not using my phone to handle e-mail at all.
Click to expand...

Mmm... that would really affect my efficiency as it's not always possible to get back to the office and I therefore use my iPhone or iPad to keep on top of things. Seems like a backward step in respect of getting things done. I suppose what I'm asking is what tools do people use to handle working in this way.
 
Lizzie said:
Mmm... that would really affect my efficiency as it's not always possible to get back to the office and I therefore use my iPhone or iPad to keep on top of things. Seems like a backward step in respect of getting things done. I suppose what I'm asking is what tools do people use to handle working in this way.
Click to expand...

I use Things on mac and iOS. Share services takes care of email on iOS (and web pages, and more). Sorry to have to tell you, but IMHO Outlook is an inadequate, outdated tool for those who want to move easily between work, home and on the go.
 
Lizzie said:
I suppose what I'm asking is what tools do people use to handle working in this way.
Click to expand...

I use OmniFocus on Mac, iPad and iPhone so not directly relevant to your Windows environment but hopefully this will give you an idea of what is possible with different tools.

OmniFocus provides an email-to-inbox feature whereby you can forward emails directly to your GTD inbox. This is useful if you use Apple mail or Outlook on iOS, neither of which have sharing capability built in. However there is also a mail client for iOS named 'Spark' that has direct sharing capability, so you can capture an email from this app directly into OmniFocus or any other GTD app that supports sharing.

I am guessing there must be Windows-based apps that support email-to-inbox. It's a feature that many task managers have.
 
Thanks for the replies. I have no alternative but to use Outlook and I've always found it an excellent tool in the office or on the go, but not for this particular element of GTD. It would be great to hear from someone who uses the same Windows/iOS environment to see how they tackle it.
 
Thanks for this, it could definitely work on my iPad but it's too difficult to use on my iPhone. In the meantime I've worked around it by setting up a Waiting For folder in email and a rule to send all email there if I enter 'wf' in the body text. Just need to remember to review that folder in my weekly review when on my pc.
 
I'm in the same boat. I use Outlook on my work laptop, and the app they gave us doesn't allow categorization. They have since allowed us to access our tasks in other apps, so I've brought them into the app I use for home tasks - Pocket Informant. Again, all categories are lost. So I've started using keywords for the different contexts (eg @call, @mtg, WF etc) in the task title. Then I've setup smart filters for the tasks with those keywords in it, so I use these to generate the lists (based on tasks, not emails).
Note that this means I can't just flag and categorise the email, I have to create a task. I also can't embed or attach the email to the task, and even more annoyingly I can't copy from the email to the task notes. If I need to insert the email I flag it, and also put a note in the task (eg insert email from Bob 23/9), and I'll do this when I get back to the office.
It's a workaround, and not perfect, but better than doing all my processing on the laptop alone. I have a lot of time to spend on my phone but computer time is limited and I need to keep that for doing the tasks, and limit processing as much as possible.
 
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