Get Everything Done

I just signed up for the beta and received the instructions this morning. I have reviewed them and read a lot of posts and this looks very promising. I am excited to try it and cannot wait to start. I have one question as I get myself ready to try this, how do you handle voice mails and emails within the system. I get about 300 emails a day and about 25 voice mails a day. Any suggestions as to how to deal with these or do I keep them outside of AF? I do not think that is the spirit of AF so I think I have to keep them in the system. If I can get by this one stumbling block then I will be off and running. Looks very promising.

Hi Larry

Recommendation would be to have tasks to "check email" and "check voicemail" on your lists which enables you to review them when prompted by AF and then readd them to the last page as a later prompt. If there are specific tasks arising from those emails then they can be added into the system and actioned as appropriate. Given the volume of emails/voicemails you may wish to add this to any separate "time urgent" sensitive list as recommended by Mark in the following post

http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/629549

There are a number of posts regarding recurring items etc and the following thread may help point you to some of those. However I would highly recommend getting started with the system before reading too much on the forum as it may confuse.

http://www.markforster.net/forum/post/627319

Good luck!

Hi there,

I also work in an industry (advertising) where the number of incoming emails is sometimes quite overwhelming, even though I have a blackberry.

But recently I seem to have solved the problem by setting up an autoresponse that says "I check email at 8 am, 2pm and 6pm. If your email requires a response before then, please SMS me on xxx"

I am now getting maybe 4 SMSs a day, and because I know there are no urgent emails waiting for me in my inbox, there is no anxiety (read procrastination) involved in checking.

Hope that helps.

Thanks for the ideas. I am starting today and am pretty excited about that. I appreciate the ideas and on my first list I put check email, check voice mail. The problem however is that when I check my voice mails, I will have calls to return, do I put those on the list "call back Joe, 555-1212" or do I put that on a separate sheet of paper, one just for calls. Similarly, when I check the emails many require a quick response, delegation or a quick read and deletion. So perhaps, I do the ones I can do quickly and the ones that need more work or follow up I put on the list, does that make sense? I have some ideas for cutting down the emails and that is on the list already. Thanks again

Larry

What I do when I action my "check email task" is to utilise the "for as you feel like it" rule. If that is 5 minutes that may only involve a quick sweep obver the items to see if there are any that genuinely need urgent action. If that time is longer I will action those emails as appropriate. For me "check email" encompasses anything relating to that email whether it is filing it, reading it, replying to it or whatever.

If a task arises out of that check, eg "Call Joe" then I will write it on the list and it will be done when it jumps out at me. Genuinely urgent same day tasks would need to be added to the "same day" list. There has been a fair amount of discussion regarding additional lists and other lists do have their place. However they really are best as the exception rather than the rule but I suspect you will find your own level as to what fits best with your specific work situation.

As a simple example, if I need to buy an item I will just jot it down on my list when I think of it, but that task will be "add x to shopping list". I keep my list separate but feed it from AF. When I go shopping I can just print my shopping list rather than scanning through AF for all my shopping items. In the same way you may want to have a separate calls list for pure practicality.If you have a lot of calls to make you may then end up with a "make calls" task which can be treated in the same way as the "check email" task. I would always recommend though that any such utilitarian lists are fed from AF (and that they are only used if they will genuinely help productivity). If they in any way become a To Do list then don't use them!!

You guys are great, thanks for the tips. I just started this morning and I cannot tell you how impressed I am so far. I have been so much more productive this morning than usual. The only problem is that I have an appointment to go to and I have been so busy and so productive I forgot to get ready so now I will be late. I guess I should have put get ready for appointment on the list. Anyways, thanks for all the tips I will devise my system and let you know how it is going.

Larry, great to have you part of the test. I have certainly found the forum to be a fantastic way to work through the issues that adapting to AF presents. As many have noted it is the fact that we are so often wedded to our presconceptions about what a "real" time management system should be i.e. many faceted, a product (electronic or fancy binder) etc that we have many of us found it a challenge to accept that actually it can be sorted with a pen, paper and our own judgement. For me understanding that was a real ah-ha moment and the point at which I started to trust the system, and boy does it repay that trust!

Ref the issue around being late for appointments I have found that scheduling them with an alarm xx time ahead of the meeting (i.e. enough time to finish up, get presentable and leave and travel) works brilliantly and has been effective in rousing me from my productive workflow. There are some great posts you'll come across here on how others have managed scheduled appointments, but Mark does recommend that you use a calendar of some sort to manage those.

Good luck and look forward to hearing of your progress!

This reminds me of Mark's SWEET tip - Stop Working on Everything Else Time

So you would think to yourself - for an appointment at 11am
40 minutes to travel to your appointment
20 minutes in case of delays
10 minutes to get dressed
20 minutes to grab a bite to eat
Total time = 90 minutes

Therefore you should stop working on everything else at 9.30 to ensure you arrive at about 11am.

The funny thing is I have never used this advice LOL am usually late but helps to remind me too! I don't go to meetings very often but when I do I will try to remember this advice LOL

In any case you would enter appointment times separately in your diary or calendar

From a purely practical perspective I would also recommend some sort of alarm - it is *very* easy to get so caught up in your lists that you lose track of time. Oh dear, a time management system that can cause you to lose track of time - ooo-err :-)

I wonder if people have had any further ideas on handling e-mail. For me this was the single biggest revelation with DIT and suddenly gave me a feeling of control over my e-mail. The system I used within DIT was to have a Today and a Tomorrow folder and check my e-mail a few times a day. Anything that didn't need an immediate reply (which I realized was 99% - thanks for teaching us that Mark) went immediately into the Tomorrow folder. At some stage during the day, I processed all the items in the Today folder, and then last thing of the day I moved everything from Tomorrow to Today, so that it was processed the following day. This meant that my In folder was always empty, unless there really was something requiring urgent attention.

Such a system is against the spirit of AF, and doesn't work within it. On the other hand, I find that just leaving everything within In, and having an AF entry saying "Deal with E-mail" doesn't work either for me. I have tried a number of alternatives, but none seem to work very well for me. I am wondering if others have found a better way of organizing e-mail, or any hints at all.

Hi Jaroslav,

I've tried several combinations in the past with DIT and now AF and have arrived at this approach that I'll offer as a suggestion.

When I find an AF entry "Deal with emails", or as part of my twice a day scheduled email time, I'll review my inbox. Each email is then read and either
- deleted, only for true garbage
- archived into a 2009-Q1 folder if no action needed, most stuff goes straight into here
- moved into a folder called AF if action needed, and a task added to AF
- moved into a folder called called "AF waiting on, follow up and delegated", for actions on others that I want to confirm, and a task e.g. John sent through report? added to AF
- for specific dates these are added into Calendar in outlook (work) or paper (home) e.g. phone Mr A on 30 March.
Each email does one of the above...it is moved out of Inbox straight away and kept back to zero.

This works well for me, combining an Inbox Zero approach with AF.

Regards
Jonathan

Hi Jaroslav

I have an item "check email" on every page and treat it as a recurring item. When it "stands out" I deal with my email for as long as I feel like. Although I may often do a quick check of my inbox when I take a coffee break and reply to any emails that I feel like immediately, they stay in my inbox until I action my "check email" task.

Through AF I streamlined my email considerably. I have rules to automatically file some of the many newsletters I receive - they can then be reviewed when necessary. I also set up rules to automatically categorise certain emails which makes review and filing quicker and easier.

Any emails that I can't or don't wish to action immediately are moved into a separate folder named AUTOFOCUS and listed within my AF lists for action when they stand out.

A quick check of my inbox shows it to contain 36 emails, of which 7 have already been replied to. Generally I receive around 60 emails per day - it used to be closer to 150! Occasionally, when "check email" has not stood out my inbox has crept up to 100+ but by the quick checks (in coffee breaks) I know nothing has been missed, and it generally gets cleared pretty rapidly as it is always "when I feel like doing it".:-) Prior to AF I would regularly have backlogs of several hundred emails.

Hi Jaroslav,
Like you, I found the DIT approach to emails my biggest time management revelation yet (subsequently followed by AF for getting through the action list) so I haven't wanted to lose the benefit of that breakthrough. I don't have enough discretionary time to cycle through all the AF pages each day, and email is such a key source of information, incoming work, and communication for me, so I deal with 'yesterday's emails' as a daily essential task (scanning through them, picking them off as they stand out or deciding to do nothing if not ie using AF-thinking!). I do this before or alongside working from the AF list. In other words, I manage emails 'outside of AF'. Good luck with whatever you decide to do.

Thanks for those responses. I had in fact been moving towards a system similar to Jonathan's but face the same problem as Jane in that it am not able to cycle through all active pages in a day (in fact in can be as long as a week). This makes it difficult to see how to make either Jonathan's or Christine's systems work. I am thus tempted to try Jane's suggestion of more or less dealing with e-mail initially outside of AP and just entering those e-mails which take a significant amount of time to deal with as separate AF items. I'll post here in a while to let people know how that works.