Get Everything Done

Hi everyone,

I'm relatively new to DIT, having been using David Allen's GTD for a couple of years. I much prefer DIT so far for it's simplicity. I do have a question though about how to deal with the backlog of work I now have having just come back to work from a weeks holiday.

I have 239 emails in my Inbox to deal with, as well as my physical in tray and voicemessages. I have read this post http://www.markforster.net/blog/2007/8/2/back-from-holiday.html which basically says to treat the emails as a backlog, which is fine, but how does one deal with the actions resulting from all those emails?

My interpretation of the methodology is that I should do as many of them as possible tomorrow. I can't believe this is the best thing to do though as I can't possibly do a weeks worth of actions in one day!

Help!!

Thanks
Adrian

If you CAN do them all tomorrow and they are what need doing most, then do them tomorrow. I would think you'd ferret out the list on your task diary based on when things are due.

What if you react to todays emails tomorrow and start a backlog with the rest? This assumes there are non-email things you should be addressing soon too.

Part of the manana effect is that after a day, those emails often arent quite as urgent as they seemed when they've first popped up.

Thanks Mark. I must admit to being slightly confused. You seem to be suggesting that I should prioritise my actions based on their urgency - ie when the deadline is?

My understanding of the DIT method is that everything should get done tomorrow, and should not be prioritised, either by urgency or importance. Is that not the case?

Adrian

There are others better at this than me, but I'll give you my take and others may chime in.

M Forster talks about figuring out what constitutes a days work (which is all you can do - right?). I think that is critical. To tackle your list, you'd have to take into consideration that some things have to be done before others. There are also some things that arent due for a while but need time and thought to be successful.

Here's where you - and hopefully others - need to check me: everything that is yet to be done is on a backlog or in the task diary. Actually, the only other place I can think of is somewhere unprocessed like the email inbox, or note scraps.

One more point.

The Task Diary has a way of testing how good you are at keeping your commitments to yourself. I found that with GTD too much stuff turned into a "Someday Maybe" when I used that method.

Hi Adrian

Mark F has written an article on this site called "Back from Holiday" which explains just this problem. Either go to top left of this site and type holiday into the search box and I think it should be the first entry in the list of search results, or copy and paste the following link into your browser (I haven't checked to make sure it works but it should do): http://www.markforster.net/blog/2007/8/2/back-from-holiday.html

Oh, as I previewed the post it appears the link actually is a hotlink so just click on it to go to the article!

Hope this helps

Hannah

Hi everyone

Thought you might like to know how I'm getting on with this. It's now Friday, 5 working days after getting back from holiday, with one 13 hour day yesterday mostly spent travelling (a great time to catch up on things like email!). I have just this minute finished dealing with my email and deleted my 'Holiday Backlog' mail folder - that felt good!!

I now have 23 items to do today on my Will Do list - some of which are left over from last weeks holiday. There's no chance of me getting through them all.

Depending on how I do today, should I then declare another backlog on Tuesday (I'm in meetings all day Monday so won't be able to do anything on my list) and work through that next week?

I guess that's the right thing to do, but realistically it's going to be the end of next week before I complete all the things that came up whist I was on holiday, two full weeks after returning to work. Surely that can't be in the spirit of GED, can it?? Maybe I've just got too many committments?

Your thoughts would be much appreciated.

Adrian