Email

I first read Getting Things Done by David Allen in about May 2007 and since then I’ve been using most of the concepts in my work life and it has probably saved me hundreds of hours and reduced my stress incredibly.

But there is one thing that I didn’t quite get until last week, that looking back now seems pretty stupid. When an email comes into my inbox that is actionable, I would star it and then archive it (I use Gmail for all my email these days). I did do this for all action items, regardless of whether or not they could be done at any time. Last week I realised that about 15% of my next actions couldn’t actually be done until some date in the future. These items were polluting my next action list and I was unconsciously filling up mental ram even though there was nothing I could do about them.

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I always knew there had to be a feature in Outlook to schedule the sending of an email for a certain date in the future, I just never had the motivation to actually find it until this week.

In Outlook 2007 (it is probably available in older versions as well), when composing a new email goto the Options tab, and click the Delay Delivery button, set the date and time you wish the message to be sent, and send the email as normal.

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