Get Everything Done

Since a couple of days I'm incorporating the processing of email and other inboxes (sorry if this sounds to GTDish) as "normal" repeating AF tasks, meaning: I work on them, cross them out and rewrite them at the end of the AF list. The problem I face is that I have four huge backlogs by now:
- paper inbox office
- email inbox office
- paper inbox home
- email inbox home.
I guess the reason is that quite often I cannot complete a full cycle through all my active pages. Consequence of these backlogs is that I already missed at least one deadline. Thus I will return to my former pattern, meaning checking email and paper inboxes regularly during the day and have them empty by end of the day.
Just for clarification: Processing an inbox means for me (more a less like GTD tells us):
1. read an email/paper,
2. decide what to do with it (actionable or toss, file or into tickler)
3.a. either act on it immediately, if it is shorter than approx. 2-3min or
3.b. write a task into my AF notebook.

Christian,

I have two suggestions. First, you need to find a way to cycle through your list at least once a day. (There were some posts back this week showing how you can "cheat" the system if your intuition tells you you should be moving faster from page to page). Second, have you separated your incoming e-mail and paper from your backlog? You should try and separate them. Then you would be able to be up-to-date with your incoming e-mail and paper, while chipping away your backlog. You would have then, on your list:

- e-mail inbox work
- e-mail backlog work
- paper inbox work
- paper backlog work
- e-mail inbox home
- e-mail backlog home
- paper inbox home
- paper backlog home

I hope this helps a bit.

Natalia,

thanks for your posting. Backlogs are already separated and will be treated accordingly (otherwise I would be outed as someone who is not familiar with Marks books ;-) ).
Well, cycling through the list at least once a day is easier said than done. There are days with just one or two hours of discretionary time. And there are tasks which simply take a couple of hours and it doesn't make sense to interrupt them again and again (actually sometimes I'm in a "flow" and forget about the time).

Mark,

I think we handle email/paper inboxes differently. I do it very much GTD-like: Inboxes are collection points for incoming information, requests, ... (and I try to keep the number as low as possible). And processing an inbox doesn't mean acting on the items in it (with the exception of 2 minute taks). So ideally after processing an inbox, the inbox is empty and all items are either
- deleted/thrown away
- filed for reference
- put into my tickler file
- done (if less than 2 minutes)
- delegated
- or filed for acting on it combined with a new item in my AF list.
This way even a 30-40 item inbox (email or paper) can be emptied in about half an hour.

Christian

One thing I've found helpful for newsletters or emails that I want to receive but don't necessarily want to read daily, is to set up a rule to automatically file them. For example I get a number of Genealogy emails that I will read but not necessarily immediately and they can clog up my inbox. I have Outlook set so that all my Genealogy mail goes to a separate folder (and have other newsletters automatically filed as well). I can then scan through quickly or just leave the folder to check periodically. If I find I never look at a given newsletter I can just unsubscribe.