Thank you for such a comprehensive (and immediately useable) guide. I just thought I would throw out one of my favorite aspects of Gmail—shortcut keys. You can turn them on through [gear symbol] > Settings > General > Keyboard shortcuts. I’d also recommend turning on Auto-advance (also in Settings > General, I like it at “Go to the Previous (older) conversation”). [EDIT: to enable Auto-advance, I believe you need to first enable the lab in [gear symbol]>Settings>Labs>Auto-advance]
With these two things on, the actual processing part of emails is incredibly fast. Hitting ‘e’ immediately archives the current email (removing it from the inbox but leaving it searchable), and opens the next oldest email. Hitting ‘v’ opens the “move to” tab, and you can start typing your folder (say, “action”) to select the folder, then hit enter to move it. In combination, these mean that actual maintaining of your email structure takes only a few keystrokes per email. There are a number of other handy shortcuts (‘r’ to reply, for example), but most of the time saving for me is in “archive” and “move to”
I’m about a week into trying out this system (with some modifications), and it feels really, really good.
You can turn them on through [gear symbol] > Settings > General > Keyboard shortcuts. I’d also recommend turning on Auto-advance (also in Settings > General, I like it at “Go to the Previous (older) conversation”).
Thanks! Knew about the shortcuts, but auto-advance is a huge boost to my email workflow!
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I’m about a week into trying out this system (with some modifications), and it feels really, really good.
Found another helpful addition to the gmail part of the system—install google lab “Multiple Inboxes”, and add an inbox for “Action” and an inbox for “Waiting” (or whatever labels you use for those categories). I set mine to show below the main inbox. So now whenever I go to gmail, I see my inbox, whatever “action” emails I need to deal with, and whatever emails I’m waiting for a response on. It helps make sure I don’t forget about my “processed” emails.
What modifications?
I really like the pomodoro technique (so far—still in the novice stages of using it), but its rigidity doesn’t lend itself well to a lot of tasks that I deal with—reading papers and writing code, mainly. In both cases, it takes a lot of work to wrap my head around things, and I lose that if I take a break at the wrong time. So when I’m doing those tasks, I’m breaking off chunks that roughly correspond to 20 minutes (like a sub function of code, or reading the intro and methods of a paper), and working until I hit that milestone. When I’m doing something where it doesn’t matter when I take breaks, I’m trying to follow the pomodoro technique more exactly.
Other than that… I’m actually not sure that I’m doing much that’s very different. I think that may have been a reflexive addition of fudge factor. Although I reserve the right to make further modifications.
Oh—one minor addition to the Eizenhower matrix. I’m trying to follow a common rule in the academic world, that every day you should spend at least an hour working on the project that is closest to completion. Which is just a way of weighting things within the “Important” row.
but [Pomodoro’s] rigidity doesn’t lend itself well to a lot of tasks that I deal with—reading papers and writing code, mainly. In both cases, it takes a lot of work to wrap my head around things, and I lose that if I take a break at the wrong time.
I definitely have this problem too, now that I write a lot more code than I used to back in Aug 2013. You may be interested in my proposed solution, the Pomodoro for programmers.
Thank you for such a comprehensive (and immediately useable) guide. I just thought I would throw out one of my favorite aspects of Gmail—shortcut keys. You can turn them on through [gear symbol] > Settings > General > Keyboard shortcuts. I’d also recommend turning on Auto-advance (also in Settings > General, I like it at “Go to the Previous (older) conversation”). [EDIT: to enable Auto-advance, I believe you need to first enable the lab in [gear symbol]>Settings>Labs>Auto-advance]
With these two things on, the actual processing part of emails is incredibly fast. Hitting ‘e’ immediately archives the current email (removing it from the inbox but leaving it searchable), and opens the next oldest email. Hitting ‘v’ opens the “move to” tab, and you can start typing your folder (say, “action”) to select the folder, then hit enter to move it. In combination, these mean that actual maintaining of your email structure takes only a few keystrokes per email. There are a number of other handy shortcuts (‘r’ to reply, for example), but most of the time saving for me is in “archive” and “move to”
I’m about a week into trying out this system (with some modifications), and it feels really, really good.
Thanks! Knew about the shortcuts, but auto-advance is a huge boost to my email workflow!
-
What modifications?
Found another helpful addition to the gmail part of the system—install google lab “Multiple Inboxes”, and add an inbox for “Action” and an inbox for “Waiting” (or whatever labels you use for those categories). I set mine to show below the main inbox. So now whenever I go to gmail, I see my inbox, whatever “action” emails I need to deal with, and whatever emails I’m waiting for a response on. It helps make sure I don’t forget about my “processed” emails.
Other than that… I’m actually not sure that I’m doing much that’s very different. I think that may have been a reflexive addition of fudge factor. Although I reserve the right to make further modifications.
Oh—one minor addition to the Eizenhower matrix. I’m trying to follow a common rule in the academic world, that every day you should spend at least an hour working on the project that is closest to completion. Which is just a way of weighting things within the “Important” row.
I definitely have this problem too, now that I write a lot more code than I used to back in Aug 2013. You may be interested in my proposed solution, the Pomodoro for programmers.