Inbox zero day
An inbox is not a very good way to manage a task list. This has slowly dawned on me, crystallized by this excellent talk by Merlin Mann. For quite a while, I’ve been carrying around a load of residual emails and tasks that, with difficulty, I could get below 100. As part of moving to a Mac and planning to move away from the Mac outlook equivalent (called “Entourage”), I decided to try to implement these ideas. I’m using a development version of a program called Omnifocus to keep track of tasks, and I have now, as of this morning, either taken care of everything in my inbox or set it up as a task and filed the email message (this may explain why some of you have heard from me recently…).
It’s a nice way to start the new school year. From now on I plan to either deal with email right away for things that can be done in less than two minutes, file it somewhere based on when I will be able to respond, or turn it into a task. We’ll see how it goes.