For the last week I’ve been reading many on-line accounts of people who have implemented GTD. I don’t believe in re-inventing the wheel and I feel that I’m already doing (although perhaps not well organized) many of the principles of GTD. Many thanks to all of those that have been so kind to share their methods.
One of the initial questions I’ve asked myself is what do I want to accomplish with GTD and from that what guidelines do I want to follow as I implement it.
Simply put what I want to accomplish is an improvement in my own efficiency while at the same time reducing the stress. I also want the method or process to feel comfortable and natural so that it will be easy to do and maintain. I captured some of my basic guidelines that support my goal in the diagram below.
As I was considering the first GTD component (Collect) it occurred to me that there were opportunities to do some organization planning that would make the “Collect” and “Process” components easier. Looking at my own situation I would say that over 60% of my incoming data is via email. There appears to be an opportunity to presort inbound email data by some simple intelligent use of email accounts. I already have multiple email accounts that I loosely use for different purposes but with some firm disciple and planning this could lead to additional efficiency. Below is a concept for email account utilization.
The last account (em1234…) could be disposable so that when it get too much junk or spam you delete it and get a new one.
The basic idea here is that by having separate email accounts coming in I can then use Apple’s Mail App along with it’s rules and Mail Act-on to file, mark, or tag incoming email as to it’s source and there for it’s general category. If the to address is “earl.moore@xxxx.com” then it’s personal or personal business, it it’s to “ebmoore@xxxx.com” it’s business related, and so on.
There would still no doubt be some spam that would find it’s way into each account but the quantity of junk mail would be less on the more carefully guarded accounts and could more easily be filtered out. Anything coming to “em1234#xxxx.com” could be trashed automatically.
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