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GTD: Inbox Zero and Weekly Reviews

Posted on August 10, 2008
Filed Under gtd | 3 Comments

This week was a bad week. Even though I’m pretty organised in my approach to dealing with large amounts of stuff, I realised this week that I was losing the battle and something needed to be done to turn things back around in my favour.

I read Dave Allen’s book, Getting Things Done (GTD), about a year ago and as he it puts, GTD is nothing more than advanced common sense. I tried out his simple folder structure but further adapted it to achieve Inbox Zero. For me, when an email arrives I apply one of six verbs to it: delete, archive, respond now (ala five sentences), delegate, defer, or deal with. The deferring requires me to do nothing an leave it in my Inbox, however, my Inbox must be cleared by the end of the day. If I cannot deal with the email by the end of the day it is escalated to a task. Then it moves into my action stack (something for a later post).

However, even with this in place I was still a slave to my Inbox last week. So I did some more research and found the answer in Merlin Mann’s talk he gave at Google just over a year ago. Switch off email and check it periodically. Simple but effective. I have now regained control of my Inbox. So now it goes something like this: 1) Turn on email client. 2) Process unread emails. 3) Turn off email client. 4) Do something else 5) Goto 1 an hour later.

Right, I think I’ve got a better handle on my Inbox but why am I doing all the stuff I do? I’m sick of guessing, so on Friday I carried out my first weekly review. I looked back at the events of the previous week and in agile retrospective like fashion stepped through what I did, identified the good, the bad and the ugly, and suggested actions to make things better. The review took about 15 minutes and was the most useful thing I did last week, in fact for the last few months.

I then went a step further and thought about what my objectives are for 2008 and held the things I did last week against these. Again, another startling revelation, my accomplishments last week, although plentiful, brought me no closer to achieving my objectives. A quick re-think and re-visit to my suggested actions for this week and now I have a much better idea of what I need to do this week and how I can realistically achieve it, whilst demonstrably working towards my now clear objectives.

I highly recommend that you take the 15 minutes out of your week and do the review. You will surprise yourself, and if you anything like me, don’t you just love surprises…

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