The Getting Things Done philosophy includes an In Box which is where you put all the things that need your assessment. Whilst assessing the In Box, if you can do it within 2 minutes then you might as well do it straight away.

I’ve noticed over the past few years I’ve procrastinated on things that might take me as little as 10 seconds to get done. I’d often walk by something and be reminded that I need to do something with it, only to leave it for another time. I’m now trying to change my ways. If something grabs my attention anywhere in my house or office and it takes less than 2 minutes to deal with, I now try to deal with it immediately. This is a simple, minor, change in behaviour but it has had a remarkable affect on my well being.

I’ve just started ‘Getting Things Done’. This post is a little ahead of some others I’ll be working on, so they’ll be a lot of ‘how did he get here?’ wandering around your brain whilst you read it. More posts will fill in the blanks.

I have a number of Smart Mailboxes setup in Apple Mail. Some are for clients, others for specific people. I also have two for actions. These are things I have to do.

The first is a smart folder that basically congregates all content in other folders. This is so I can see all the actions I have to do, regardless of its context.

The second is a smart folder showing all actions I’ve decided to do today. When I flag a e-mail message it turns up in that folder. This means that at the start of each day, or whenever I feel like it, I can flag a couple of actions and get a list of what I need to do. I don’t use To Dos in iCal or anywhere else, because all of them just keep shouting at you. I need to quieten things down a bit.

These of course are not all my actions. I have a A5 based organiser which has projects and loads of associated Next Actions. I therefore need to keep looking there to make sure I’ve not missed something. But I like the idea of working at my computer and not having to look in two places.

So, I’ve come up with some fake e-mail addresses. When I need to send myself an action, I e-mail chris.action@mydomain.com. A rule in Apple Mail then files it accordingly when received.

Likewise, chris.today@mydomain.com for actions I must do today.

I have recurring events in iCal. Normally these go ‘bong’ at appropriate times and flash a message at me. I’ve changed these so they use one of the two addresses above to make sure I don’t forget I’ve been reminded. If you want to do this on iCal, you need to add extra e-mail addresses into your record in Address Book, then restart iCal so it picks up the new addresses.

Next steps will be to see if Automator can make the process of ad-hoc actions more seamless and/or see if a widget can be developed for quick creation of actions without going through the mail creation process.