Comments on: Email Todo

By: Eran Kampf

Eran Kampf — Sat, 29 Jul 2006 10:50:29 +0000

I used to have a system similar to yours, where I categorize emails in folders etc. and recently I’ve switched to a much better way (at list on my opinion) for organizing my emails.
I put everything (both incoming and sent items) in a single folder.
I use flags to categorize emails and required actions. With flags you can assign a date to the email and in Outlook 2007 each flag automatically creates a task in my Tasks folder (which is one of the features I like the most about Outlook 2007).

By: Gary Preston

Gary Preston — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 16:53:41 +0000

I use Thunderbird as my email client which supports 5 seperate user defined labels (in addition to the usual read/not read/important flags).

With these I can mark work based email as TODO, URGENT, ON HOLD… Each email then appears with a nice colour highlight to let you know the status, in addition you can define additional views such as display only read, unread, todo.

In addition to that I tend to keep all my emails on the IMAP server although set to duplicate locally for offline viewing should the email server ever go offline. I agree it would be nice to flag email with a “todo by date” I’ve not checked, but perhaps there’s an extension that supports this. Although I tend to keep my main todo list in colour highlighted RTF file.

By: GBGames

GBGames — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 12:46:22 +0000

At my day job, I create folders in Outlook named @TOPIC_PENDING and @TOPIC_DONE for whatever TOPIC is.

CURRENTPROJECT, PROBLEM, FEATUREREQUEST, and of course MISC for those things that don’t fit.

I then tell Outlook to tell me the total number of messages in a folder rather than unread messages. That way, I can look at my folders and tell right away how many things I have on my plate. When I get into the folder, I organize by date and quickly go through to see what might be pressing. After a task is finished, it goes in its appropriate _DONE folder.

I believe David Allen advocated this approach, and I’ve found it quite useful.

By: Jake Birkett

Jake Birkett — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 10:50:27 +0000

I use an excel spreadsheet except for quick things which I put on paper. If something on paper lingers for a while, I put it on the spreadsheet. I don’t have mutiple “scraps” or paper, just a neat A4 sheet and I cross of done tasks. When it’s full I start a new one. Simple and effective. The spreadsheet has sections for different tasks types and also the sections are sometimes prioritised. I also like to look at the spreadsheet quite often and extract the important tasks I am going to do today for example.