Tuesday, July 1, 2008

TiMiTips - Free life tips to the world

Recently I have been some reading about time management, namely, Hack Your Day.

From there I came across some sites that lead me to a increase on email on email processing.

According to GTD, Get Things Done, I have the following buckets, which are merely Gmail labels:

#DO-FAST
#DO-LATER
#DO-WEVER
#DO-W8

The following Gmail filters:

Matches: #DO-W8 DO-W8 do-w8
Do this: Mark as read, Apply label "#DO-W8"

Matches: subject:(#DO-FAST DO-FAST do-fast)
Do this: Mark as read, Apply label "#DO-FAST"

Matches: subject:(#DO-WEVER DO-WEVER do-wever)
Do this: Mark as read, Apply label "#DO-WEVER"

Matches: subject:(#DO-LATER DO-LATER do-later)
Do this: Mark as read, Apply label "#DO-LATER"

This buckets only receive (are labeled) items which I cannot process in less than 30 seconds, as for example a simple , wedding styled, "Yes, I do".

#DO-FAST :: Receives everything which needs to be processed in the same day
#DO-LATER :: Receives everything which needs to be processed in the same week
#DO-WEVER :: Receives everything I want to check same day later
#DO-W8 :: Is waiting for an answer. It can also be in another DO-* bucket.

On the end of the day I process the #DO-FAST. If I don't finish/assign a task I'll have to send it to #DO-LATER.
On the end of the week I process the #DO-LATER. If I don't I'll have to send it to #DO-WEVER.
Of course I can leave them in the same bucket and reiterate everything once more.

The key thing is that any part of the path #DO-WEVER - >#DO-LATER -> #DO-FAST is not permitted.

Everytime I need to send something to a bucket I just send a mail to myself with the label "do-fast", "do-later", etc

See ya,
Tiago Matos