BACK TO BASICS

I am glad to see that my post on Open Forum, Productivity Tools For Your Worklife, has been "retweeted" so many times. I want to highlight C. Scyphers, who gave a short & sweet summary of my post:

scyphers says: Tips for managing time: (OpenForum) Recap; Actual inbox, empty email, mindmap, small tasks, take notes, always improve (1st October 4:19, Tweetmeme / Twitter.)

Anita Campbell of Small Business Trends, wrote the following comment on my post:

Martin, good article! I have tried, but I find it impossible to a zero inbox -- or even close to zero, say 30 unread emails. Unfortunately, my unread emails number in the 3-figures or 4-figures. Of course, most of those are monitoring emails, such as Google Alerts, or newsletter subscriptions, or email notifications about comments on my various blogs. I've tried setting up special folders and automatically pushing certain emails to those folders so I can review them later. That helps. But even so, unread emails just accumulate in my inbox. Then eventually they get archived, and that helps keep the numbers down. Of course, my business is mainly Web-based and 99% of everything we do involves email. But I wonder if others have the same problem? -- Anita (Open Forum, idea hub - topic: innovation, October 2009.)

As I said in my post, I have struggled with maintaining an empty email inbox for a long time. At the moment, I have 8794 messages in the inbox... I have to archive them and start from scratch again. I am sure that the GTDInbox is a great application and solution to this problem. Please read, Why Email is Addictive (listen to the rats), for a possible explanation to the email "problem"...



Amanda Stillwagon, editor of Small Business CEO, has used an excerpt of my post in her post, Work Smarter With Productivity Tools. Please feel free to leave a comment here, at SMBCEO.com, or a vote at bizSugar.

I will go back to basics and use a low-tech solution:

• Stack of index cards with a clip, a.k.a a Hipster PDA. I am using pre-printed to-do cards by Stiernholm Consulting.
• Small pens. I am using a TEC pico pen and a Fisher space pen.
• Notebooks. I am using Moleskine notebooks.

For inspiration, I will participate in Stephen Smith's "work.life.creativity" forum and continue to read Todoodlist by Nick Cernis. [Editor's note: If you are interested to read Todoodlist and at the same time support my blogging, please click the "buy now" button. I wonder if I have to add a disclosure to this post? Read Duncan Riley's post, My FTC Disclosure, and have you done yours yet?]

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