P.S. I just interviewed him a few days ago, and he gave me additional ideas to think about, esp. from a GTD perspective.

For the to-do list, I have to agree with you Jeff that Outlook works just fine for me. That’s not a knock on gootodo, but in a corporate environment like this, Outlook is the best tool for the job. Not that it’s the best tool for every job, but in an Exchange environment where everyone needs to be on the same system to be productive, Outlook folders and such are sufficient. Dare I say almost irreplaceable? Without a complete corporate overhaul to shift to some new system, we have to make do. Gootodo or a similar system might be a good supplement, but not a replacement for practical purposes.

And, for the first time, yesterday I zeroed my inbox. This morning I came in, sat down, weeded through the deluge of new e-mails from last night, and once again my inbox is at zero. It’s… an odd feeling. I can relate to the example in the book of someone who said, “well now what do I do?” Of course, that’s just my work inbox.

My personal inbox(es) are almost never at zero, but none of that is work-related or action-required material: just quick notes from friends or the like that don’t really need to be moved anywhere at the moment. They just serve as quick reminders. I don’t want to start a to-do list of personal things like calling my brother-in-law… it’s unnecessary.

You know… I think once I finish the book I’ll just write my own review instead of pouring out step-by-step reviews here. Not to say I won’t be back to this page.

Theoretically, it makes sense to deal with email daily; moving tasks to a task list; moving events and appointments to a calendar.

Of course, I am a worst case example. I have my work account, my BigBlueBall account, and a Gmail account that I all check daily — and all of them still hold months (or even years) of old emails. I also have accounts on Hotmail and Yahoo, but I rarely even check those.

What I really should do is have three accounts. One for work, one for my website businesses, and one for personal email. Get rid of the others and do a thorough purge of what remains. I’m going to give it a try this week and report back.

It’s not all that practical to completely empty your inbox every day. I certainly don’t face quite the overload that he mentions in his opening chapters (i.e. “Busy Man”), but completely wiping out my inbox doesn’t work for me.

I try to keep my inbox floating around ten e-mails on any given day. Yes, most of my incoming mail can be immediately sorted into one of several dozen project folders and subfolders. Meeting requests are saved to a calendar and discarded, and the same goes for tasks. I routinely check through my folders to see if I can delete e-mail strings that have since been updated (instead of the one from two days ago with messages D-C-B-A, I keep the one from yesterday with messages G-F-E-D-C-B-A).

But… some of my e-mails don’t merit a folder of their own, yet can’t be deleted yet. For example, one of the e-mails currently in my inbox *technically* could be moved to a project folder, but it’s an extremely short reminder to check the status of a project once it launches. If I move it to the associated project folder, it’ll quickly get lost among the other, more important e-mails, and I’ll be back to overload. Things like that.

I have no problem keeping some e-mails in my inbox without getting overloaded. I think Hurst is trying to be a little too gung-ho on a problem that doesn’t merit such an extreme solution. No?

I’ll let you know how it goes once I get further into it. I was at my sister’s wedding this weekend, so I had precious little time to read.

Wooooooooooo!