shahine.com/omar/

Since I am out of the office for the longest stretch of my career, I had to think about how to deal with all the email that would be delivered to my exchange mailbox.

You see the problem is that I really don't want or need to be reading any work email while I am gone. However, since Exchange manages part of my life, I do want and need access to my calendar, tasks, notes and contacts. In fact, I've found that being away from the office actually increased my dependency and usage of tasks in Outlook/Smartphone. I do need to launch and use Outlook without seeing 3000 unread items in my Inbox.

I'm also realistic about the fact that there is some work email that I do want to read. It's not work related, but from people that will be emailing my work email address. This includes co-workers that are also friends.

So what I did was this:

1. Remove myself from every non critical distribution list. I noted the lists that I unsubscribed from in a new task that I created called "DLs to rejoin". It has a due date of the day after I return to work.
2. I made sure that every rule that processes mail has "Stop processing more rules". This ensures that when the rule moves a message to a folder, no other rule can operate on that message.
3. I created a "Hold" folder in my inbox. I then created a rule, that I placed at the very bottom of the server side rules that moves every message that has not previously been moved by a rule, and where I am not in the To line, to the "Hold" folder.
4. I changed Outlook to show me Outlook Today when I launch it. Outlook today is really old, lame and crusty though. It used to be the default in Outlook XP I think but since then they've made "Inbox" the default. I'm thinking of switching to something like Jello.GTD for my home page or creating my own.

That's it. Since leaving work I've received about 20 messages in my "Inbox". The rest have been filtered away.

In fact, I had an "aha" moment when I did this. There is so much less junk in my Inbox now, that I feel myself less anxious. I can actually budget an hour or so a day to go into my "Hold" folder and really quickly delete threads and other non relevant emails in one sitting. Previously this is something I would do all day long... which would result in my sitting and staring at my inbox some times and feeling like I would never get through my email. With this new system I can actually get to zero messages every day.

The reality of Microsoft is that email is like a fire hose and your inbox is like a small bucket that can't hold all the water. The hardest part about GTD for me has been just the energy required with staying on top of email. The problem with email is that the majority of it is not actionable and gets deleted, but as humans we are weak and the sensation that you are "buried" all the time by a constant stream of this stuff gets unbearable. Personally I'm not strong enough to really allocate some time a day to do this and I end up doing it all day long... from my desk, for my smartphone and from the web.

This Hold folder idea simply turns the firehose into a garden hose, and redirects the rest of the water to a really big holding area that you can visit on your own time... hopefully after the water has settled a little bit and the amount of energy you spend processing isn't repetitive.