I’m interested in ways that people document, prioritize and execute items they need to do. What have you found useful?
For me: I don’t particularly care about other Outlook functionality, but flagging emails and managing them in the sidebar has helped me a lot. I have it set to display only items due today, and then sorted into categories like “now,” “soon,” “pending.” If I don’t expect to get to an item today I change the due date to tomorrow or next week. Items don’t have to be based on an email either, you can just type into the sidebar text field.
When I get emails I either immediately reply, flag it for later action, or ignore, and then I drop all emails into one giant folder. If I need to find something I do it all by search.
I’ve tried other systems like gmail’s to do list, but it feels like way more friction to accomplish the same things, especially wanting to only view tasks due today, and categorizing tasks.
Likewise I’ve tried to-do-list apps, but not being able to instantly convert an email into a task, and not having documentation easily at hand when I go to perform the task makes them feel more burdensome.
As of late, calendar for meetings, memory for todos. If I can’t remember it, it wasn’t that important. If it was that important, someone will call asking about it. I’ve delivered too many “urgent reports” that sat unread for weeks, if at all.
That’s an interesting philosophy. You haven’t had people annoyed that you didn’t follow up on something they’ve asked about? I guess my memory at least isn’t good enough to track everything I need to do. Or maybe I could remember but feels like more work/risk than having an external system. I also primarily deal with customer facing stuff so maybe I’d feel different than if I was only dealing with coworkers.
I also mostly deal with customer facing tasks, my calendar is 80% filled with meetings. If I need to prepare something important, it needs to have a calendar blocker otherwise I won’t physically have time for it. If I can do it immediately (send some email, provide some existing report or documentation, I do it immediately and arrive 3 min late for the next meeting).
If something slips through the cracks I apologize and say “I was busy with x, Y and z, haven’t found time for it yet”. Helps to have “fuck you” seniority I guess, I wouldn’t have dared doing that 10 years ago.
A few years ago speaking to a VP he told me every week he empties his inbox. Not in a GTD way, just mark all as read. Rationale: “if something is important they will call me”. Email and slack are best-effort channels for me since then.