Empty Inbox

Perhaps this is nothing worth celebrating for the highly disciplined and meticulously organized, unfortunately I do not belong to this group. To me, this is a personal achievement. I emptied my inbox.

It happened just a couple of days ago. I was so happy that I dragged my immediate colleagues to take a look at my blank inbox screen. It is like I reached email nirvana for the first time at work.

Personal effectiveness at work is always something that hounds me. Bursting inbox, late email replies, pieces of unscheduled information, these are just a few to name off my head. With increased work responsibilities, I knew I needed help, and for the past couple of years, I had been seeking methods to alleviate these problems. Read some books about the matter and searched the net for related materials. Some did help, if I am convinced enough to try, and they worked with varying levels of success.

Some weeks ago, I came across a couple of articles in Wired magazine about this methodology called Getting Things Done (commonly known as GTD by netizens). The idea was brought forward in a similarly titled book by David Allen in 2001. Although the book achieved national success in the US, the cult-like following was actually the result of an evolving industry, which includes software, guidebooks, online communities, which spurn off in the interpreting or support of this theory.

The central idea in GTD is really simple. It rests on the belief that one needs to move tasks out of the mind by recording them externally. This relieves the mind from always having to remember the 'stuff' that needs to be done so that it can actually concentrate in doing them.

Lying on the GTD principle, a related article which I also came across focuses specifically on emails. The author suggested 3 other folders to be created on top of the generic 'Inbox', 'Sent', 'Draft' and 'Trash'. The 3 new ones are named 'Act', 'Later' and 'File'. Everything in the Inbox is either dealt with right away or it gets into one of these folders when they are not deleled. This eliminates the time burden of having to revisit matters which all gets acccumulated in the Inbox. The 3 folders apparently needs to be reviewed and managed regularly so that they are not just a mindless relabelling exercise.

I gave it a try and I think it does work for me more so than the other methods I tried. Getting more curious than the summarised information on the net can satisfy, I went out to get the GTD book by David Allen 2 days ago and is learning more as I go along, tapping into the ubiquity of mobile technology to do this as much as I can. I think this can actually be fun.