I find myself in a place where I can't imagine going back to life before GTD but I'm so ineffective at implementing it that it's actually counter productive. I've been working at it for over 5 years now and I need some help! Let me provide some context.
I'm a 40 year old guy, just relocated to Singapore with my family to take a new role where I lead a sales team for a software company I've been with 16 years. I'm responsible for APAC region while our HQ is back in Europe. Mornings should be when I can get some work done, while afternoons, when Europe and then US comes online, are when the back-to-back calls start. Given the global nature of our business, I'm getting 200-300 emails a day to process, coming in all day long.
So my day starts with trying to process the new emails from overnight. Sometimes 50-100, of which 10%-30% will have next actions for me, and of course hundreds more come in during the day. I have a number of Outlook plugins and mouse shortcuts that help me delete, file and convert to next actions anything I can't delegate or do in 2 mins. But this process can still take me 1-2 hrs, especially if I didn't get my inbox to zero the previous evening. So it's mid-morning at best before I even look at my next action list, get a few overdue things done and then grab a quick lunch before the back-to-back calls start.
Any notes and action items I take from meetings or calls I usually capture on paper, and I make sure to clearly mark the AIs with the intent that I copy them into my OutlookClearContext based lists later, but sometimes this happens days only later. Heaven forbid I'm away on business travel for a few days, my inbox gets out of control and I feel even more overwhelmed.
And of course I don't do my Weekly Review regularly or completely. I have 2 hours allocated to it on a Friday morning but rarely respect it. If my inbox has gotten on top of me I can easily spend 2-3 hrs clearing a 300-600 email backlog, generating 50-10 next actions on a list I sometimes haven't looked at in days. I go through this stale list and take little pleasure in checking off tasks I'd completed during the week because they started to burn, rather than due to me being in control.
Bottom line: I seem to spend too much time trying to process my inbox and not enough time working through my next actions list. I'm supposed to be a strategic leader, but I'm ruled by my inbox. I sometimes go days without even getting to my list, so it becomes a "blackhole" where I send stuff to get it out of my inbox but I don't trust myself to look at it and therefore don't trust my system anymore. But there is no going back to pre-GTD days. I really am feeling stuck. Any suggestions!?
I'm a 40 year old guy, just relocated to Singapore with my family to take a new role where I lead a sales team for a software company I've been with 16 years. I'm responsible for APAC region while our HQ is back in Europe. Mornings should be when I can get some work done, while afternoons, when Europe and then US comes online, are when the back-to-back calls start. Given the global nature of our business, I'm getting 200-300 emails a day to process, coming in all day long.
So my day starts with trying to process the new emails from overnight. Sometimes 50-100, of which 10%-30% will have next actions for me, and of course hundreds more come in during the day. I have a number of Outlook plugins and mouse shortcuts that help me delete, file and convert to next actions anything I can't delegate or do in 2 mins. But this process can still take me 1-2 hrs, especially if I didn't get my inbox to zero the previous evening. So it's mid-morning at best before I even look at my next action list, get a few overdue things done and then grab a quick lunch before the back-to-back calls start.
Any notes and action items I take from meetings or calls I usually capture on paper, and I make sure to clearly mark the AIs with the intent that I copy them into my OutlookClearContext based lists later, but sometimes this happens days only later. Heaven forbid I'm away on business travel for a few days, my inbox gets out of control and I feel even more overwhelmed.
And of course I don't do my Weekly Review regularly or completely. I have 2 hours allocated to it on a Friday morning but rarely respect it. If my inbox has gotten on top of me I can easily spend 2-3 hrs clearing a 300-600 email backlog, generating 50-10 next actions on a list I sometimes haven't looked at in days. I go through this stale list and take little pleasure in checking off tasks I'd completed during the week because they started to burn, rather than due to me being in control.
Bottom line: I seem to spend too much time trying to process my inbox and not enough time working through my next actions list. I'm supposed to be a strategic leader, but I'm ruled by my inbox. I sometimes go days without even getting to my list, so it becomes a "blackhole" where I send stuff to get it out of my inbox but I don't trust myself to look at it and therefore don't trust my system anymore. But there is no going back to pre-GTD days. I really am feeling stuck. Any suggestions!?