GMail GTD – a practical method for harnessing your inbox overload stress

The principles of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system have been a huge help for me in, would you believe it, getting things done. A friend recently asked me to describe how I work GTD principles within Google’s GMail to maintain control of the dreaded email inbox. Here is an outline of my personal technique based on the most basic of GTD methods.

GTD requires you to make decisions. These decisions categorise your tasks – in this case emails – into what needs doing right now, and what can be left until later.

It is critical to be strict and realistic with your decision making. If something really does not have to be completed immediately, do not mark it as such. Conversely, if something can be completed tomorrow without creating any problems, but it would be nice to have it done today, do not be tempted to mark it for immediate action.

What’s that? Procrastination? No. It is about deciding what must be done compared to what does not have to be done. Once you have cleared immediate tasks, there may be time to complete additional tasks.

How to reach inbox zero without deleting everything important

If you have an inbox bursting at the seams, here’s how you deal with it on the first run through.

1. Create three new GMail labels: “@action”, “@deferred”, “@waiting”
   These are your GTD context labels, they mean, respectively, “needs doing now/today”, “needs doing later”, “needs someone else to do something first”. The “@” symbol is merely a visual indicator that these labels are unlike any others and will also place them more accessibly at the top of your labels list.
   Give your labels appropriate colours: strong red for @action, for example, so each applied message draws attention to itself in any mixed listing. 
2. Repeat after me: my inbox is transient: it is not for storage!
   
3. Your inbox should contain only the items about which you have not made a decision
   and, if appropriate, not assigned a context label. If you have read an email, then you should also have decided what to do about it, if anything, and it therefore should no longer be in your inbox.
4. Go through your entire inbox page with the following rules:
   1. If the email requires a response/task today, mark it @action
   2. If the email requires a response/task in the future, mark it @deferred
   3. If your are waiting on a response on an existing conversation, mark it @waiting 
   4. If the email does not require any action, leave it (or delete it) and move to the next.
5. Select all your emails and push the “Archive” button.
   Boom, there they go, if your inbox was only one page: you have achieved the fabled “inbox zero”
6. Keep going through your inbox pages in the same way.
   Once you are checking emails that are more than a week back in time, chances are you’re in email territory that do not require to action, so Archive the lot. Archive emails still exist within “All Mail” menu item and get returned with search results.

Now for your daily regime

Each and every morning, as your very first task, do the following:

1. As above with your inbox 
   It is very important to resist actually doing any tasks at this stage, merely filter them by context label to get that inbox cleared as quickly as possible – it gives a huge psychological boost!
   Make a decision there and then. One of the problems with emails is we tend to keep making decisions about what is in the list over and over again during the day, searching for what’s important and what is not.
2. Go through your @deferred label emails and define @action to any that you need to do that day
3. Go through your @waiting label emails and look for any that need to be @action to chase a response, for example.
4. Go into your @action label emails and do what needs doing
   one by one, removing the @action label each time they are dealt with – add @waiting label if your are requiring a response. Take care not to add @waiting to everything, only those you need to receive an actual response.
   When going through the @action emails, I follow these rules:      
   1. If it will take less than a minute to respond/complete the task, do it immediately before going to the next email.
   2. If it will take longer than a minute, add it as a task to your main GTD solution (Things, Omnifocus, moleskine, day’s task list – if you use one) 
   3. Once all that day’s immediate @action emails have been cleared, do those that will take a little longer.
   4. If you come across an email in @action and think you could leave util the next day, don’t just leave it, move it immediately to @deferred
      It’s vital to learn trust in what exists within each label context, otherwise you end up checking and re-checking just in case.

One important point is to give thought to what you dump under your @action label. There’s only so much you can realistically get done in a day, so try to be strict with what absolutely has to get done that day. Then, if you manage to clear @action you feel great, and you can always pop into @deferred and find a new bunch of actionable emails.

If you do not clear your @action messages in a single day, then you must re-evaluate your criteria for selecting what to @action. My main GTD task list rarely contains more than 10-12 @action items in a particularly day as, on average and due to the nature of some of my tasks, it is very rare for me to complete more than this many individual tasks in a single day. It is psychologically much better to clear a list of tasks then go grab some more, than to constantly see a task list that is never complete.

The result 

Using this system gives me inbox zero usually by 8 a.m. each morning (because most of my incoming emails appear overnight) on both work and personal inbox. I can then schedule my email handling time during the day based on how much needs doing.

You can add other “@” labels, of course (I have been pondering a @toread action for stuff that needs reading but not actually doing as a task or responding), but I don’t suggest you add more than another two or three as you’ll add unnecessary levels of complexity  and end up not really knowing or trusting where everything has been put and it makes the initial morning inbox-clearing decision making process much slower. This clearing should be an almost immediate decision of where to assign the email.

GMail Labs

There’s a gmail Labs addition that enables you to move your labels panel from the left to the right of the screen, I’ve found that’s really helpful in reminding me it’s there and giving me quick access to my context labels.

Inbox zero

I have found the now regular sight of an empty inbox a very positive psychological boost to banishing the feeling of email overload. 

Keep your GTD solution simple. GTD, being easily customised to your own perceived needs, can rapidly become so bloated with unnecessary processes that the GTD process itself becomes as big a point of stress as the still mounting tasks. I promise you, if you keep it simple, you will be more productive, and most importantly, your task-stress levels will reduce.

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