How I manage my to-do list with email: Part 2

Keeping track of all your to-dos is never easy, but implementing a process and system to manage them can really help you function at your optimal capacity.

I recently shared a strategy outlining how to:

• Archive all your email so you never have to worry about deleting an email again
• Declutter your inbox
• Process your inbox
• Track everything you delegate and everything you are ‘waiting for’ via a Pending folder.

In this post, I’ll cover managing and tracking your next actions so you never have to worry about dropping the ball again.

As mentioned previously, efficiently processing your inbox involves doing one of four things with each email:

• Read and delete. No action is needed.
• Do. If I think it will take me less than 2 minutes to respond to an email, I will do it then and there and then delete it.
• Delegate. Forward, ask someone to do something based on the email, and then delete it. Per my previous post on this topic, remember to copy yourself when you delegate over email so you can track everything you’re waiting on someone for in your Pending folder.
• Queue up for the next action needed. These are the emails I need to spend more time on and that I haven’t been able to delete, delegate, or do within the 2-minute rule.

Let’s focus on that last point: how to queue up things for the next action needed.

Constructing contexts

One core tenet of “Getting Things Done” is to group all your next actions by context. In its simplest terms, this means defining a set of mutually exclusive categories that you can use to group and prioritize your subsequent actions.

Everyone will have different contexts they want to work across (see below for mine). The trick here is to define those contexts in a way that makes sense for you and is as simple as possible. It is also important to define them so that each next action only goes into one context. This keeps the overhead of managing your next actions to a minimum.

Here are mine:

I implement this for my email by creating an email folder for each “context” and then moving each “next action” from my inbox to that folder.

Here are a few examples:

• My friend emails me and wants to catch up. I drag the email from my inbox into my Call folder.
• My wife emails me and asks if I can pick up paper towels. That goes in my Urgent/Important folder 😊
• My colleague emails me and requests I review a presentation, but in no hurry. It goes into my Not Urgent/Important folder.
• Someone sends me an interesting article on Vegemite. Into the Someday folder it goes.
• My boss emails me and says he wants to discuss an upcoming site visit. This goes into the Agenda folder for when I meet with him next.
• One of my team members told me they just finished a presentation to an important client. This goes into the Recognize folder.

Hopefully, you get the idea.

Later, when I get ready to go on a drive, I check my Calls folder and call my friend.

When I next meet with my boss, I go to my Agendas folder to remind myself of everything I need to discuss with him.

When I’m at my desk first thing in the morning, I hit my Urgent/Important folder for all the urgent and important things I need to do.

When I finish those, I hit the Not Urgent/important folder and get a start on those.

Then, when I’m done with all my projects and have time to breathe, I check my Someday folder for new things to do.

Never drop the ball again.

Creating a code

The above works great when you receive and act on emails, but what if you want to create and manage the next actions for things not associated with an email you have received?

For example, you might think of something urgent and essential you must do or someone you need to call. How do you get these follow-up actions into your email system?

Here’s what I do.

Let’s take an “urgent/important” next action as an example. If I want to remind myself to complete an important presentation by the end of the week, I email myself the Subject line “Complete presentation $ui.” I then have a rule set that looks for emails from myself with a “$ui” in the subject line, which automatically moves that email into my Urgent/Important folder. Voila! Next time I’m at my laptop, I will check my Urgent/Important folder, and see my next action to complete the presentation.

To break this down further, for each context:

• Come up with a code you can put in the Subject for any next action you want to automatically move to the folder for that context.
• Create a rule for the context that will look for that code as part of the Subject and then do the move.

For the example above, the rule would look like this:

Note: The examples in this post are from Microsoft Outlook, but most other email applications allow similar rules and settings

Below are the codes I use for all the contexts mentioned above. All you need to do now is create a rule for each code that is the same as the example above but with the corresponding code for each context.

With the above in place, you can also handle the following scenario:

Someone sends you an email to ask you for something, and when you respond to say, “I’m on it!” you tag the subject with “$ui”, so your next action is automatically put in your Urgent/Important folder for follow-up. This saves you from having to respond AND manually move the original email to the folder yourself. Yes, it’s only a few extra steps, but it all adds up over a day, a week, or a year. And these posts are all about being an email ninja, not an email grasshopper.

Final reminders

Two more things and we’re done, but these are very important to remember.

First, the ordering of your rules in your email system matters. It’s essential that the first rule is to move all received emails to your Received folder. This ensures you will continue to archive all emails you receive, as explained in my first post. Then come the rules to manage context-based next actions as explained above. Finally, the last rule should be to manage Pending emails, which you copy yourself on when you want to track or monitor that something gets done. Ordering your rules in this way ensures they are applied in the correct order so that the system works.

Second, you will need to update your Pending rule so as not to move all these next-action emails to your Pending folder as well. To do this, simply exclude all these emails from the Pending rule, as shown below.

That’s it! Now, you have a way to track your next actions by context. When you complete each next action, you can delete it from the context folder and move on to the next one!

At this point, you now have a way to:

• Archive all your emails so you never have to worry about deleting them again.
• Declutter your inbox.
• Process your inbox.
• Track everything you delegate and everything you are ‘waiting for’ via a Pending folder.
• Track your next actions by context.

Stay tuned for my next post on using this system to manage projects and deliverables that require many next actions to complete. It will also include a few additional advanced techniques that will move you into black belt territory.