Productivity doesn’t occur in a bubble. No matter how meticulous you might be with the flow of your organisational system, if nobody plays along it wreaks havoc on your output. Train people to play along!
The Microsoft Office Outlook Team Blog writes up a guide to using Outlook’s categories and search folders to organise your messy inbox and prevent email overload.
If we had to guess, we’d say that Gmail’s latest Labs feature, putting an unread message count first in the title bar and tabs, was probably inspired by a certain Firefox add-on …
Productivity writer and Inbox Zero advocate Merlin Mann shares some of his recent updates to his talk about email-wrangling, including a bit of advanced common sense about why stashing away your emails isn’t productive. Acting on them, and then killing ‘em off, Mann says, is where you want to be: The idea here is that you probably don’t have a place in your home or office where you store the shells from every peanut you ever ate. If you did, you’d definitely want to organise them by the year in which you ate them, perhaps keeping separate jars per-month or per-location where you ate the nut. You know. For posterity.
Blogger Chris Brogan has finally gotten his email inbox down to zero messages, and shares his tips on how to get there. Using a combination of an archive folder, calendaring software, project tracking software, and an improved file structure, Chris handles all his inbound email with two core processes: sorting email as it arrives and reviewing his to-do list regularly. (He uses previously mentioned Things to manage his tasks and projects.) Chris says this method only works if you’re consistently reviewing your to-do items and email: This will all break down fast if I don’t focus on Things as my “go to place” to see what needs doing. And if I don’t make THAT the focus of my day while working on projects, and slip back into hounding my inbox, the whole thing will fail.
How I Tamed My Inbox [Chris Brogan]
