Today I’m making a little side-step by talking about personal efficiency.
Although this might not seem to be related to ECM, I will show that it is. The common denominator are the structuring of unstructured data, file plans and event processing (I’m deliberately not calling it BPM).
What I will share with you, is the way I deal with my email and how that allows me to keep my Inbox empty! The empty Inbox might surprise you as much as I’m surprised by people that have an Inbox full of read and unread, flagged and un-flagged messages
I used to be that way too, That was until I ran into GTD, Getting Things Done. Google a bit if you want to know more about GTD and its creator, David Allen. Up front I must say that I’m not a purist but have adopted GTD and tweaked it to suit my needs. From what I read, this is what every GTD user does.
Email is disturbing you and me in whatever we are doing but we are also disturbing others with our emails as well. And since it is a reality that we can’t ignore, we’ll participate and are left behind with the task to take care of it in the most efficient way. This is where GTD offers us tremendous help.
I’ll give you the basics as shown on the reference card with some narration on how I use it.
Key in processing the input in your inbox, is this: I read an email once – directly when it arrives or on a later moment that suits me better – but no matter which way, I do decide what to do that same moment I read the email. And trust me, it never happens to me that I don’t know what to decide.
So let’s start with the easy options: those email that carry no action for me. This gives me a few options:
- Delete. Both mine and your email store is not a Records Management System so it is save to delete emails. It takes some time to dare so, but you’ll get used to it. It did.
- File. If I need to keep the email but there is no action, I file it immediately. For this I have a created a successful file plan. I’ll share the concept in a minute or two.
- Defer. Once in a while I get this email that typically is unimportant for now but that I maybe do want to act on someday. Like a newsletter from a vendor talking about a new software release that I want to play around with. Deferring this email is ok. If I never do anything with it, still no harm is done. In stead of filing them in a folder, I convert the email into a task with a due date that is somewhere in the future but before it no longer make sense to act on the email. In the given sample this might be a month from now.
What remains are the options where I do need to act. Sorry for that. Can’t promise you that incoming email leads to no work at all…
- Projects. There is a grey area between action-less and actionable: projects. Projects are things you need to do but involve planning and multiple actions. I convert these emails into tasks and assign them to the category “Projects”. During conversion into a task, I copy the email body as well as the complete email into the task body, include the first action I need to take and set the due date for that first action. I have a macro that does most of the work for me.
Next is the key decision moment: do I have to do it and if so, what is the effort?
- Delegate. If something needs to be done but not by me, I can delegate it. Delegation does not mean: throw over the wall and forget. It remains my responsibility that the action will be executed. So in my forwarding email I add a little key that can be picked up by one of three rules. I add @WF24, @WF48 or @WF. This triggers a rule to create a copy of the email after sending that is filed into the “@Waiting For” folder (again underneath the Inbox). It also sets a due date that is a day, 2 days or a week from now.
- DO IT. If after reading the action is to do something that takes less than 2 minutes, just do it. Re-reading the email later to make the same judgement also takes 2 minutes.
- Meet. Some emails are requests or invites for appointments/meetings. If so, I convert them into an invite or meeting. The difference? In the invite I invite others. For a meeting I just block time in my agenda. Both are supported with macro’s that do the creation and copying of the content.
- Take Action. I’ve tried as much as possible to keep from getting more work to do, but unfortunately, the majority of my emails do lead to something I must do sooner or later. AT this point, for sure the email ends up in my @Action folder. The question becomes: when is action needed. Today? Tomorrow? Net Week? Next Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday? This weekend? I make that call and set the due date accordingly. Again, I have macro’s to reduce this to a few clicks.
What does this bring me? An empty inbox! I’m in control of all the email I get. Things that I need to do are reduced to:
- Working down the actions in the @Action folder
- Monitoring the responses to the emails that are in the @Waiting For folder
- Taking care of the tasks on my To Do list
- Attending the meetings/appointments that are in my agenda
As said, some emails are filed immediately. Others get filed as soon as the required action is finished. For this I have structured my email store. First, I have multiple stores. I have personal Outlook Data Files for each customer I work with, one for personal mail (like vacation reports, time registration, training information), one for all corporate mail) and one for new business development. If I need more, I just create one. Off course I do create frequent backups. In each store I create a folder structure that is useful for that type of store. Think of folders for projects, assignments, recurring meetings etc. Without a few exceptions, I have no folders for people. I like to structure on content and not by whom I received the email from. I do make a folder for a person e.g. if I do regularly have email conversations that are not bound to a particular topic that would lead to a regular folder. An example would be my manager.
To make life easier I have macro’s (download and import in the Visual Basic Editor) bound to a toolbar in my Inbox view. There are macro’s that create actions for today, tomorrow, next week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and the weekend. There are also macro’s that convert the email into a task, a meeting and an invite.
There are also three rules (download @WF, @WF24, @WF48 and import in the Rules and Alerts dialog) for intercepting the outbound emails that require monitoring the response.
Last but not least, I tweaked the view of the @Action and @Waiting For folders a bit. These views are now grouped by due date. I also tweaked the To Do list. It is grouped by due date and within a due date by category.
I started by stating that this blog post is a little sidestep but still has some common elements in relation to ECM. We discussed the file plan and structuring unstructured data. The method I described is a form of event processing. Basically I use the incoming emails events for create queues with tasks that need to be taken care off and the outgoing email events for a monitoring queue. Since I have no fixed rigid flow that I follow to do my work, the link to BPM is not there even though some would see task and due dates as the key elements in BPM.
Bottom-line: I shared with you the way that works for me in dealing with email. I hope there are some clues for you as well.
