Design Sapling.com

Trouble keeping yourself organized?

A new system may seem great at first, but one day you realize that you haven’t used it in weeks.

These have been my excuses:

• Forgetting about it. Web app? Calendar program? Out of sight, out of mind.
• Too lazy to write it down. Sometimes, it’s not convenient to stop what I’m doing to add something. When I’m in the flow of work, that’s where I like to stay.
• The INBOX is already a To Do list in itself. Nobody wants to keep track of multiple lists.

Here’s a system that hasn’t let me down.
It uses Gmail, the GTD plug-in for Firefox, and optionally, Google Calendar.

Here’s what you do:

1. Get all your email from one place
   If you don’t have one, start a Gmail account. You can have Gmail check your accounts for you. Your other accounts messages will be labeled as coming from your other account. Any replies you send can be sent from Gmail, but the recipient will see you other email account, so nobody has to learn a new email address. This alone can save you lots of time.

   Worried about keeping work mail separate from personal mail? It’s under control. With a single click, you can view all the messages from your work email account without seeing any of your personal messages.

2. Use Firefox
   Since you’re using Gmail now, you’ll be using a browser to check your email. That means you can check your mail from anywhere that has internet access without worrying about setting up an email client.
3. Install a Firefox add-on that you can forget about.
   Now, we’ll convert your Gmail into a To-Do list by installing the GTD add-on. This will add-on will add new features to Gmail that make it easy manage tasks. It uses Gmail’s label feature heavily. Use labels to tag messages as Work items or Home items, tag them as a messages regarding a specific project, as references, or however you see fit. Email messages can be labeled with many different labels at once, so you can label it both Work and a specific project. Label a single message with as many labels as you see fit.

   You’ll also label every message as either “Action”, “Next Action”, “Someday”, etc… These labels tell you how urgent a task is. Learn more from the GTD walk through once you install the program.
   
   One-click viewing of Work To Do or Home To Do
   Use Gmail’s QuickView feature to create one-click access to certain labels. For instance, if I want to have one click access to messages labeled “Home” and also labeled “Action” or “Next Action”, I just do a search for “label:Home (label:Action | label:Next-Action)”. Create a new QuickView (you may have to turn on QuickView in settings) and use that search string as the input. I name the QuickView “Home To Do”. Now I just click “Home To Do” in the Gmail sidebar, and everything I want to do after work that day pops up.

4. Add your calendar into Gmail
   If you don’t want to use Google Calendar, you can stop at the GTD add-on. Using your INBOX as your one and only To Do list eliminates most of the problems that keep you from sticking a scheduling system. However if you want to visually represent those items hour-by-hour, Google Calendar is your best bet.
   • Automatically add upcoming calendar events to your To Do list
     Google Calendar can automatically email you notifications about upcoming events. You can setup a Gmail filter that automatically applies appropriate labels to that email based on the calendar that sent it. (You can have multiple calendars in Google Calendars: One for work events, one for leisure, etc…). Since those Gmail labels define you different To Do lists, you only have to add your events to Calendar once and you can forget about it! It’ll automatically be added to your To Do list when that date comes around!
   • Web-based.You can view it anywhere with internet access.
   • Keep using your old calendar.You can link Google calendars with Outlook or iCal. Keep using your old calendar program, but see the tasks in Google Calendar as well.
   • Email yourself new eventsJust like you can add new tasks to yourself when you use Gmail as your To Do list, you can add new events to Google Calendar with email.
   • See you calendar in GmailGoogle provides you with an option to have a mini calendar, complete with a color coded list of upcoming calendar events, display directly in the side bar of Gmail. (You will have to turn this option on. Go to Gmail Setting, click Labs, and scroll down to find it. Enable it and it’s done!)

What does this mean? Your Gmail window can be your To Do list, and any upcoming events in your calendar can be added to your that do list, all in one web page, accessible from anywhere in the world, whether it’s for work, for home, freelance jobs, or anything else. You can keep using all your old systems if you want (although, I don’t know why you’d need to).

I don’t mean to promote Google too much. There are lots of good systems out there that work fine. I’ve tried some that I’ve liked, but I always find myself not sticking with them. Using Gmail, Google Calendar, and the Firefox GTD add-on, everything I need is in a place that I already check at least once a day, my email. I can’t forget about my To Do list.

The result? I’m getting more done in less time. Accidentally waiting until the last minute to do something because I forgot about it is a thing of the past. As soon as I get an email, I use GTD to help me label it and add it to my list. If it’s a personal email, I read it an archive it or a label it “Home” and check all my “Home” messages after work. My INBOX is clean. I can easily check my schedule.
You can even use your cellphone to text Google Calendar and it will send you back upcoming events. It doesn’t get much more convenient.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 17th, 2008 at 4:29 am and is filed under Organization. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.