Planning your life with Gmail

A successful approach to combat stress and increase productivity is described in Getting Things Done by productivity guru David Allen (Amazon, Bol.com). I’ll describe a simplified version of that approach here. It takes less than 5 minutes to get started and can save a lot of time and stress; you’ll see if you try!

Offload your brain
The main idea is to organize actions and offload the brain. Trying to remember what one has to do is just a waste of energy and causes a lot of stress. Instead we’ll use a simple system. It should be simple because you’ll have to trust it or you’d keep trying to remember your TODOs.

Getting Things Done (GTD) suggests to choose one “bucket” for all incoming information that is actionable (messages, invoices, everything). Actionable means that some concrete action can be done on it (be critical!) and that you cannot delegate it to someone else. Non-actionable information cannot be acted upon but can be used for reference. Having more places that explicitly or implicitly contain tasks would be more complex than necessary, so no piles on your desk! A natural choice for many networked people is the Inbox of their e-mail account, such as Gmail.

Label your tasks
Gmail let’s you label messages with labels of your choice. See Settings, Labels. You can create as many as you like. When you open a message, you can choose the labels that should be associated with it. If you don’t use Gmail, your e-mail service may support labels as well or at least folders, which are similar.

Now create the following labels: “Action” (should be done in the next couple of days), “Some Day” (should be done but can wait several days), “Future Idea” (could be done), “Working On” (keep track of non-actionable information you often need), “Waiting On” (non-actionable for you but keep track of it). All tasks that are not done yet will have exactly one of these labels. I use Star (in Gmail) to mark the Actions with the highest priority.

Put all tasks in Gmail
How to use this? Simple: write down everything you have on your TODO list in a separate e-mail to yourself. Include really everything, including “wash the car”, “figure out what to do on that special weekend” and “learn Spanish”. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something that should be completed tomorrow or whether it’s just an idea for whenever in the future. Next, label the messages with one label each. Use the highest priority labels (Starred and Action) sparingly; is that task really so important?

What about tasks that don’t arrive as e-mail but on paper? There’s one thing you can always do: write yourself a message with a description of the task and store the physical object somewhere you can find it when you need it.

Time-based tasks
What about time-based tasks? You can add them to Google Calendar instead and let it remind you by e-mail one or two days in advance. Then it will automatically enter your “bucket” at the right moment. This is very useful for recurring tasks as well (Calendar reminds me weekly to vacuum clean the house and I actually do it ).

Just try and adapt it to your style when you get used to the idea. And make sure you keep adding everything as a task (looking somewhere and thinking “ahh I should X” is a good hint).