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I’ve been experimenting with David Allen’s GTD (as well as other productivity methodologies) for a while now and have settled on an implementation that works rather well for email. In this post, I’d like to give you the process I follow to organize my email life and code for an Outlook macro that automates many aspects of the process.

Disclaimer: I by no means claim to have developed all of the methodologies described herein. This is simply my implementation and conclusions drawn from several productivity methodologies which include David Allen’s Getting Things Done, Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero , GTDGmail and of course many posts on Lifehacker. I HIGHLY RECOMMEND visiting these links.

Simply stated, GTD is a method for keeping track of your life. Since many of us live in a world where email is constantly piling up, a method for managing email and the tasks associated with those emails are imperative. I’ve read David Allen’s book several times and I like many of the ideas, but find I need a simpler method for tracking everything.

Below, I will outline the various steps of the modified GTD process I use on a daily basis. Hopefully this will help you gain control of your inbox and add a little more order to your life.

Quick Rundown (for the impatient)

For those that would like the quick and dirty overview of this method, here it goes (a full tutorial follows).

• Aggregate all your email to Outlook (or similar email program)

• Create a folder under your “personal folders” inbox called “file”

• Create separate Outlook categories for “Action”, “Complete”, “Reference”, “SomeDay” and “Waiting”

• Create an Outlook category for each project you are working on. (e.g., “Infrastructure Move”, “Soccer Practice”, “Business Opportunities”,etc…)

• Create search folders to search for items categorized as “Action”, “Complete”, “Reference”, “SomeDay”, and “Waiting” (you should have 5 search folders, one for each)

• Create an Outlook macro (code below)

• Create a custom menu called GTD to run each macro function

• Categorize your inbox and use your 5 search folders to work from

Each step is explained in detail with screenshots below.

Centralize Your Accounts

Effectively managing tasks across multiple email accounts can become a nightmare, especially if you have more than two email addresses. The first step to organizing your email life is finding an email client that fits your work style. There are many out there (Mozilla Thunderbird, Emacs, Mutt, Microsoft Outlook). Right now, I’m using Outlook for several reasons, so everything in this article will reference Outlook processes. I’ve experimented and been very successful implementing this in Thunderbird, but lack of good calendaring integration with Outlook prevented me from moving forward with Thunderbird. Someday…maybe.

Most of us have many email accounts. I have two or three that I use consistently. Set up your IMAP or POP accounts in Outlook (the Outlook documentation is pretty good around this) so that you are only using one client for all your email needs. This is one of the most important steps of this whole process.

Everything should come into one big email bucket. It really is amazing how much easier this makes life. I resisted this for a long time and didn’t want to use the IMAP feature to import Gmail to Outlook; I really liked the Gmail interface. When I finally made the jump and brought Gmail into Outlook, the ease of use and integration of personal life with the work life made a lot of sense. I use the system described in this post for both personal and work email.

When all is said and done, I have an Outlook sidebar that looks like this:

Inbox Triage

The inbox is meant to be empty. Merlin Mann says this and David Allen suggests as one method of workflow. Every email that comes in has a set of buckets that it can fall into. An email may require your action. It could be reference material. It may also be something that is put off until a later time.

When email comes into the inbox, you need a quick and easy way to classify that information (more on that coming later). A decision should be made instantly and that email pulled out of the inbox and into its appropriate bucket. To accomplish this, I use Outlook categories (or tagging).

Tag and File

Outlook’s tagging feature is a nice way to assign a category to an email. Tagging is nice for several reasons, but mainly because you can use multiple tags on a single item. This allows you to later sort and organize your email in a multitude of ways.

When an email arrives, your job is to 1) tag and categorize it and 2) get it out of your inbox. To do this, first categorize, and then move. In Outlook 2007, go to Actions|Categorize in the toolbar to open the category dialog box. But what categories should you use?

Personally, I categorize every email with two tags: an “action” tag and a “project” tag. The action tag tells me what I need to do with the item and the project tag tells me what category they belong to. For example, an action belonging to the rollout project. The action tags I use are:

• Action – something that requires my attention or action to get done

• Complete – this is a completed item. When I’m done with an action, I tag it as complete so I know what I did all week (useful for status reports)

• Reference – this is a link or document that someone sent me as FYI or is good to have for reference later

• SomeDay – My “tickler” file. Things I’m working on that are long term or ideas I have that I don’t want to lose.

• Waiting – designated for a task that someone else is supposed to do or items that I am waiting to hear back on.

We all have multiple projects we are working on at any given time. Kids soccer games, rollout of new IT infrastructure, investments, buying a new car - you name it. Every email that comes in can be 1) deleted or 2) tagged and filed. So, an email comes in asking me to update the project plan for the IT Rollout. I tag it as an “action” and belonging to the “IT Infrastructure” project. Done.

The second part of this is filing the email. Your inbox wants to be empty. Now that you’ve tagged the email, get rid of it. I use a folder called “File” in my “Personal Folders” within Outlook. Everything that has been tagged goes into one huge folder called “File” (I will show you how to search/organize this later). This way the email is out of sight and out of mind (for now). This is how my Personal Folders look in Outlook.

Clean Inbox, Now What?

Ok, the inbox is cleaned and you have a folder of tagged emails. Outlook provides you with the ability to create “search folders”. Search folders act as normal folders, but are based on criteria of your choosing. So, to put a little meaning around the madness of the File folder, I create 5 search folders: Action, Complete, Reference, SomeDay and Waiting. The look like this in the sidebar:

When you create a new search folder, you are asked what for search criteria. Naturally, you will want to search based on category (or tag). If you’re creating the Actions search folder, choose the Actions Category.

Now, when you click on the folder, you should see all the Actions categorized by Project (note – you may need to modify the view layout to make sure it arranges by Category):

Where the Rubber Hits the Road

Organizational systems are nothing new and productivity gurus have been around for years. You may have the best productivity system implemented but it is of ABSOLUTELY NO USE if you do not take the time to utilize it. To successfully utilize this system, a periodic review must performed. This would be a daily or weekly review (whatever works best for your workload), but the point is it must be done.

I personally go into my actions bucket once a day and check to see what I have to do. This bucket drives my daily grind. If there is not an action in this search folder for me to do, it doesn’t get done. Similarly, don’t forget to check the SomeDay or Waiting bucket as they have to be checked periodically to make sure long term items are getting done.

The David Allen Company has created an Outlook plugin that does much of this functionality for you through using Outlook Tasks. It looked to be a great product when I tried it, but it didn’t fit my personal workflow.

Bringing it All Together

At this point, you have an understanding of the process flow. For summary purposes, the process is outlined below.

To organize everything, I rely heavily on the “Favorite Folders” of Outlook. If you have more than two email accounts in Outlook, the “Mail Folders” view becomes cumbersome very quickly. To overcome this, I place the inboxes of all my email accounts in my favorite folders. This way, I spend most of my time in a select few folders. I also place my search folders in my favorites. 90% of what I need on a daily basis can be found in my favorites folder.

Automation with Macros

Automation of this entire process is done with a macro I’ve written for Outlook. This macro is very simple and has a lot that can be done to it to further automate. If you have suggestions or changes, please let me know and I will post to this blog.

Sub Task()

Dim Item As MailItem

Set Item = Outlook.Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)

Item.ShowCategoriesDialog

Dim myolApp As New Outlook.Application

Dim myNamespace As Outlook.NameSpace

Dim myInbox As Outlook.Folder

Dim dstFolder As Outlook.Folder

Dim fileFolderName As String

Set myNamespace = myolApp.GetNamespace("MAPI")

Set myInbox = myNamespace.GetDefaultFolder(olFolderInbox)

Set myDestFolder = myInbox.Folders("File")

Item.Move myDestFolder

End Sub

Sub SetAction()

Dim Item As MailItem

Set Item = Outlook.Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)

'Item.ShowCategoriesDialog

Item.Categories = "S-Action"

Task

End Sub

Sub SetComplete()

Dim Item As MailItem

Set Item = Outlook.Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)

'Item.ShowCategoriesDialog

Item.Categories = "S-Complete"

Task

End Sub

Sub SetSomeDay()

Dim Item As MailItem

Set Item = Outlook.Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)

'Item.ShowCategoriesDialog

Item.Categories = "S-SomeDay"

Task

End Sub

Sub SetWaiting()

Dim Item As MailItem

Set Item = Outlook.Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)

'Item.ShowCategoriesDialog

Item.Categories = "S-Waiting"

Task

End Sub

Sub SetReference()

Dim Item As MailItem

Set Item = Outlook.Application.ActiveExplorer.Selection.Item(1)

' Item.ShowCategoriesDialog

Item.Categories = "R-Reference"

Task

End Sub

To make a new macro, push Alt-F11 in Outlook and insert the code above. Note, you may have to change some of the names to fit your categories. The “task” routine moves the highlighted email to the “File” folder (so make sure a folder called “File” exists in your inbox). The sub-routines (SetAction, SetSomeDay, SetReference, …) are used to set the Action category of the email. Note, the “Task” routine is called from the bottom of each Set function.

Save this macro and go back into Outlook. The way I use these macros is by calling them from a menu item. To do that, I created a custom menu with buttons that call each “Set” function in the macro we just wrote.

To create the custom menu go to “Tools|Customize” in Outlook and hit “New”. Call the menu GTD.

Now, go to Tools|Customize. Choose the Commands tab and scroll down to Macros in the Categories section. When you click on this, you will see the names of the macros we just saved.

To insert these items into the menu, simply drag and drop the “Commands” into the GTD menu you just created. Drag all the “Set” commands into separate menu items. At the end of this, you should have a menu with Action, Complete, Reference, Someday and Waiting in your GTD menu. Note, using the “modify selection” button on the commands tab, you can set the name of the name and icon of the button on the GTD menu.

Now, when you highlight an email, you can click the GTD button on your menu that best describes what you should do with it. The “categories” dialog pops up with the button’s category checked (either Action, Complete, Reference, SomeDay or Waiting). You simply check the correct project, hit OK and the email is whisked away to the “File” folder. It will now appear in the Action category search folder under the project you selected.

Helpful Hints

If you have a task you must do, send an email to yourself. You can categorize the action into the correct project and you won’t forget it. I send hundreds of emails to myself that are actions from meetings or tasks to do around the house. Very helpful to have these handy in a central location.

To expand on this idea of sending yourself actions, you can make auto-categorizing actions. For example, if you have an action you want to send to yourself, preface the subject with something like [projName] and write an Outlook rule for it. This way, whenever something comes in with [projName] in it, the email will be auto-categorized into the actions bucket for that project. For example:

As you complete items in your action bucket, use the GTD menu to set them as “complete” to get them out of your action bucket and into your complete bucket. The complete bucket is also a nice way to see what it is you accomplished on a weekly/daily basis (for status reports, etc…).

I hope you have found this post useful and helpful. Since we have not implemented comments in this blog, if you have questions or comments about this post, please email me at . Also, if you have useful modifications to this process, I’d love to hear about them and how it is you take care of the daily grind.

Fred is interested in productivity methods and how they can be used to build a Cult of Execution in corporate culture.