Juggling Sheep
Welcome to Juggling Sheep, Jay Perry's blog about time management and personal productivity for pastors. Learn to balance work, life, family, and personal spirituality.

Share your best practices, tips and tricks, processes, sermon planning ideas, and resources. Feel free to email me: jaylperry[at]gmail[dot]com.

Friday, February 9, 2007

Gmail Gets a Gold Star

Gmail Inbox NirvanaI finally achieved Gmail inbox nirvana!

I've been working toward getting my email inbox empty for a couple of weeks now. And it finally happened yesterday.

Here's how I do it:
  1. Every message that comes in gets a cursory view.
  2. If I can deal with that message in less than 2 minutes, I do it right then.
  3. If I need to answer it later, print it off at the office, or incubate it for any reason, I star it.
  4. Back in the inbox view, I select all the unstarred emails and archive them.
Now I can tell by looking in my inbox what I actually need to do!

And the other emails are still in my archive, just in case I should ever need them.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Howdy Jay,

Just a thought, but why not use the "Starred Message" view as a TODO list and your inbox as your area for unprocessed items?

Seems like it'd be easier to jump over to the Starred area, grab an item, point and shoot. Having new items show up in directly in your todo list might be "blurring the edges" a bit, IMO.

Anyway, my $.02. Cheers!

Jay said...

Great idea.

Leo said...

Hey Jay, Congrats! I actually don't like to use my inbox as a to-do list ... I use a separate program for that. I use my inbox as a simple inbox, and process things out of it immediately, archiving or deleting everything. But if your system is working for you, I say go with it.

I keep my inibox clear ... see my post Email Zen: Clear Out Your Inbox.

Good luck on your system!

CityLights said...

No no..it's all about the GTD plugin for gmail!