Inbox Zero and Simplification

Having finally achieved a count of zero in all my inboxes (1 work, 1 personal, and 2 for various projects), the trick now is staying on top of them.

I’m sure it’s been written a bunch of times, but an inbox isn’t a to-do list, and shouldn’t be treated as one.  I’ll admit, I get a bit lazy still, so if I know something’s going to be dealt with in the next 48 hours, I’ll leave it there as a reminder, but everything else either gets archived, deleted, responded, or deferred.

But where do they get deferred to?  I’ve tried the @review, @respond etc folders that the David Allen camp seems to like, but they just become other inboxes for me, and they’re inboxes I never remember to check, so that’s turned into the best way to lose mail for weeks.

For work stuff, I throw my todos into FogBugz along with the bugs, features, and inquiries that it already handles.  Those mails are usually tied to a project, so I haven’t had to make up a “Jason’s crap” project yet, but I’m not against the idea.  It’s also not a bad thing if co-workers can see what I’m up to anyway.

I have a personal FogBugz license, but I don’t have a central host to put it on right now, so instead I’ve switched to using Backpack.   Thefree plan works fine, and almost encourages the kind of simplification that the 37signals gang tends to encourage – every major category gets a page, but with the free plan you only get 5 pages.

If I have more than 5 categories of “to do” type stuff on the go, it’s time to either crunch down and finish one or more or let something go and delete the page/category.

I used to do this with my inbox/todo list, but in that case I’d finally give up on the items that were, say 3 months old, and I’d feel bad about it not just when I delete the mail but every single day.  This new system will, I hope, give me a better sense of what I’m up to and how deep I’m in it.

The only downside is I hate spam even more now. It’s like a pigeon pooping on my newly washed car.