Email Inbox as To-Do List

Inspired by my post today about Nudgemail and always up for an experiment in time management, I’ve decided to have a go tomorrow at using my email inbox as my to-do list. So I’ve written out a list of everything I can think of, 35 items in total, and emailed each one to Nudgemail to send back to me tomorrow first thing. I did a few for this evening as well. I’ve also put reminders in for all the things in my calendar for the next month which require some form of preparation.

I’m not quite sure what to expect but I’ll publish occasional updates during the day. (Note to self: get Nudgemail to remind me about the updates)

Must go. Nudgemail is telling me to read Proust, tidy the bedroom and check my finances!

Comments

[Will]

When using a grasscatcher, I always smugly ignored advice on email, as I had the problem cracked: simply doing two or three batches of email a day to crank the actionable stuff onto the to-do list and then file the lot. What's the problem?

This leaves actually doing the tasks as a separate, as yet unsolved, problem.

On a no list system, simply reading the mail should be enough. And yet, I would be more comfortable with something a little more tangible. Perhaps slotting in the actions from mails to existing accumulating lists supporting specific tasks.

This is of course essentially the same for all inboxes. Here, "Getting Things Done" is right: you have to convert the unknown to the known, incorporate the known into the decided and convert the decided to the done.

The quest is to support this with a combination of routines, external artefacts and internal conscious and subconscious thinking?