I've relied for years on a 43 folder "tickler" system in my filing cabinet (with one folder per month and 31 folders for the month I am in) where I put papers, tickets, bills, letters-to-be-answered etc relating to different days of the month and the months ahead.
A few days ago, a chance discussion with a friend about email workload and the "frenzied" nature of some email exchanges, led to us devising a tickler system for email, shown above. In the continuation post below I describe the problem, the contribution that @Tickler can make to controlling it, and how.
The problem
If you get a lot of email and do not keep on top of it, you quickly get overwhelmed. Consequently there is pressure on you to deal with email quickly. Impact? Email dialogue and workflow takes place much more quickly than it needs to: your own "efficiency" puts pressure on co-workers to be quick too; their own desire to control their in-box makes things worse. Inevitably you end up with a pile of undealt with email in your inbox. It distracts you. If the pile is big, you miss things that matter. Videos like Merlin Mann's Inbox to Zero deal with this issue in detail. Approaches like Donald Knuth's would also work, but are hard for lesser people to insist on.
@Tickler
My @Tickler folder structure is shown above. There is a folder for the current week, and for each of the next two weeks. Each week's folder has 6 sub-folders, one for each weekday, and one for the weekend. The weekly folders are numbered, so that they stack in week order. They are named unambiguously. Using "@" at the start will force the folder high up in your email client's folder structure.
How to use @Tickler
As you work through your email, resist the temptation to respond to things that can wait. Instead, decide when a response is needed, and move the email to the @Tickler folder for the day in the next three weeks when you intend to reply. Move "weekend stuff" to a W/E folder. Take account of what you know about your future workload.
Think of the emails in your inbox as requiring processing, rather than a response. Replying is what you do to the stuff in today's @Tickler folder. (Of course these rules get broken, but you get the general idea.)
Encourage the people you work with to make better use of priority tags on the email that they send, and do the same yourself. This will make your use of @Tickler even easier. If colleagues use @Tickler too they'll contribute to the reduction in the rate of flow.
At the end of the week
Allocate any un-dealt with email to days in the following week.
Rename the empty folder for the past week to that for three weeks hence (e.g., with folders names as above, I would rename "03_Jan_19" "06_Feb_9"). The week's folder drops to the correct position.
This approach seems completely obvious in retrospect, and I am confident that it will help in the battle with email. Suggestions for improvements, questions, etc, most welcome.
Seb,
I like this idea, but how do you group messages that are thematically related: e.g. "ALT-C Committee Meetings," "Research project 1," "Research project 2," "General Admin stuff"? Or does Thunderbird allow you to tag messages and search across all your folders?
Liz
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Liz - I do not bother, and doubt if I could. @Tickler is simply a way of placing incoming mail in the folder for the day I will deal with it. When I deal with it, if it is important enough, I blind copy it to myself anything that I need to file for future reference and then stick it in a folder. I have a filter that puts all blind copied emails into a folder for me to process occasionally. Seb
Posted by: Liz Masterman | 09/02/2009 at 09:52