• FlexTime
• Meridian

If any of you have used ‘em, I’d love to hear your inputs.

Of course, I lost the IP address I’d had since moving here in the process, but … no loss there, really. Now I must go downstairs and pick up my roommate’s network cable and bring it up here, as something tells me that he’d like to continue to have access.

Need an example? Let me provide it: Mail Act-On. I subscribe to the Getting Things Done modus operandi of dealing with email: either respond/act on it right away, or do one of three things:

• File it in an @Actions folder so you can process the action later.
• File it in an @Archives folder for later reference.
• File it in an @Responses folder so you can respond at your leisure.

Now, I don’t do this on all platforms and in all situations; here at the office, I pretty well have to file by project—partly beacuse I work so many projects at once, and partly because I stink at working the ability to edit Outlook subject lines into my daily workflow. But with my personal email, save for very few exceptions, I have stuff in those three folders.

Because I use those folders almost exclusively, it was a natural for me to start using Mail Act-On by setting up filtering rules for those three folders. Unfortunately, it was hard to do, because … what keystrokes do you use? The first letter is out, as you have Actions and Archives. The second letter is out, because you’d have Archives, and wouldn’t that make you think of Responses? Yeah, me, too.

I finally adopted the following:

• `c pushes me into @Actions.
• `v pushes me into @Archives.
• `r pushes me into @Responses.

I tried to come up with the letter that was “most representative” of the word. I finally got the system when I realized that c, r, and v were near on the keyboard. It works for me; you might use some other mnemonic, and I’m not going to fault you for it.

That said, I’ve come to use Mail Act-on for this seemingly trivial task so much that I now grouse that I have no analog here in the PC/Thunderbird world of my office touching of my personal email. It’s almost as hard on me as it is to transition between Alt and Ctrl keying of things in browsers. I have to do mental shifting every time, and it’s as jarring as going from driving a manual transmission to an automatic. [I'll make do, though.]

In any regard, if you use Mail.app, are good about filing your email, and are looking for keyboard shortcuts, I consider Mail Act-On to be essential.

I find it frustrating that the deed was in a box that I’d already opened—in fact, I’d opened it the week I moved here!—and that I spent a couple hours each of the last two nights looking for it.

Oh well … at least I’ve got a good idea of the boxes I’ve got to go through. My living room, though, looks like a bomb went off. [Wait ... that's the whole house.]

As for me and my house, you’ll pry the fixed-width fonts from my cold, dead fingers.

First, double click the e-mail (or hit enter) to open it in a separate window. Then put your cursor on the subject line and start typing. That’s it. You can add your own reference – date, project number, whatever – or change the subject line completely. Whatever is going to be meaningful to you. Use as many words you like. When you’re done, Ctrl+S to save.

Oh my. As Michael says, “Go nuts.” Very few of my co-workers are good at titling emails, and … this will make my life much, much easier. [Why? I'm the guy who keeps archives of all of his email, and people know that, so they ask me for help pulling up data when they need it.]

In any regard, if you can jot down things as you think them and re-organize that, you might get something out of it. Otherwise, it’s about like watching the output of top c—sometimes, you get honest-to-God good information out of it, and other times, you’re flipping out over things that might or might not be legit.

I do support the concept that we get crappy internal feedback that we don’t directly control and that needs to be attenuated as needed.

:sigh:

I’m hopeful that I’ll continue to be able to do these sorts of decisions the more committed to a GTD-oriented system I get. Trust me, I have plans that are coming together for the new house.

It is empty now, and I have enough energy to sustain me through to the end of the day, I do believe.

The sad thing is … reading through this, I almost was able to construct an argument radically in favor of top-posting. I’m not going to think any more about that, because I don’t want to light myself on fire.

Thus, I gave up on any sort of structured archiving … Before I had dozens of folders for people/projects/themes, etc. etc. Blech. Now, I’ve got a folder with thousands of messages that I rotate once a year or so. … The bigger point here, of course, is that people who think for a living are relying more and more on search rather than browse — and eventually personal social networks — to manage the overwhelmingly complex amount of data that they need to transform daily into information, and ultimately understanding.

I miss a nice hierarchy. I still maintain hierarchies at work because it does save time on things that I have to reference, but I don’t go past the project level down to the task level. [Some of my projects can be so small that some people see them as tasks, but because they have multiple steps, they're not tasks.] But in thinking on it, I’m finding little-to-no utility in hierarchies for personal mail, which is an absolutely crazy shift in how I think about email, because I’m buying into search rather than browse.

[And yes, Stephen, I use Lookout here at work, thanks to your urging. It works with my hierarchies because, well, I have lots of projects that have no clean edges, so there's bleed. But I can sometimes beat search with browsing. Sick but true.]

Now it’s time for me to find a mail app I like again … and to come up with a clean near-term archiving strategy manageable with IMAP, plus a better, long-term solution. Maybe I can ply Matt with vodka for his MySQL-managed mail database scripts.

Oi. I want to grieve here a little. I miss my hierarchies.

If I hadn’t already sold Chris on it, I imagine this would do the trick.

I might even take a floating holiday on either Friday or Tuesday that weekend and give myself even more time.

One of the steps that I’m taking at the moment is creating a 43-folder “tickler file” setup in my office. Yes, I’m slowly implementing techniques from David Allen’s Getting Things Done.

Man, I think Allen has a conspiracy with the file folder manufacturers of the world. This is one heck of a lot of folders+labels to mess with!

I will take photos and post them when my setup’s complete.