getting things done

I have been on a never-ending quest to be more personally productive. From using note capture services to pen-to-digital tools, creating my own format for daily notes, and using Obsidian, I am constantly tinkering with things.

Fundamentally, it all comes back to foundational methodologies; the chief amongst them for me has been David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD). I love his methodology, but it does break down for me in one key area - I cannot reduce my life to a single inbox. In fact, I enjoy not having a single inbox. Using different emails and collection methods for my madness appeals to my need for context (I have different emails for work, personal, and signing up for stuff).

Thus, having one inbox for my life is out of the question for now - and, again, I like it that way.

When I decided to implement a GTD-style system to help me be better with what I am doing and keep myself organized, it was a…well, it was interesting. When I started, I was bound to Outlook, which is not a bad thing in my book, and I focused solely on my primary source of income, my day job. 

At first, I used folders to collect everything and had a folder for each area of the company I dealt with, each project I was on, and my responsibilities. This failed. When an email contained information about two different things, I did not know what to do with it. I decided to try something different and created an “archive” folder, a “to be deleted” folder (I wanted to review emails twice before they are deleted), a “next actions” folder, a “follow-up” folder, a “someday folder” and a “waiting” folder.

Next, I created categories for all my different contexts (and I love context). I used symbols as prefixes to distinguish between context types. I used “@” as the prefix for the different departments I interacted with, “_” for job responsibilities, and so on. This allowed me to understand how each context interacted with my other contexts quickly.

Each of these contexts received a unique color (and since Outlook maxes out at 25 colors, that is all the contexts I allowed myself to use). This was useful as I used the color-coded categories to contextualize my meetings. Doing this allowed me to identify what a meeting was about just by the color of the entry in my Outlook calendar.

To make things easier, I decided to figure out a way to create toolbar buttons that would toggle a specific category. I checked forums and tried out add-ons, and eventually posted my issue to Twitter. Within a day, an Outlook champ with the Twitter handle techniclee interacted with me and even posted a solution to his blog. If you clicked that last link, you would realize how long ago this was.

His solution worked well, yet it did not meet my needs entirely. I wanted control over each category location in my toolbar and would not be adding or removing categories. Rather than bug him, I learned his code and replicated the button control bit for my 25 categories. I then used a third-party category manager demo to help me create my nice category buttons (color-coded for context, of course) and created a button for each area, context, action, and indicator grouped in separate toolbars (this was not necessary, but it appeased my inner OCD).

I then looked for a code to create a macro to send emails directly to the archive folder, and lifehacker.com came to the rescue. I even hacked that code to replace the delete button with a button that sends deleted emails to the to-be-deleted folder. All in all, it was a good solution.

But as with all things, the solution was short-lived, which is not bad. As software tools have progressed and more and more people started to care about email productivity, much more intelligent people than I built tools that either solved the problems better or introduced me to other paradigms to use.

The desire to have context to my emails has not waned, and neither has color-coding my calendar. Those were the breakthroughs that this exercise yielded, not the tools themselves. The need I framed for this exercise was a way to organize my email more efficiently; the way forward - well, that is constantly changing,