The case against a inbox with lots of items. This is certainly not a hot or unusual take but I am writing it anyway. I describe how I transitioned my TODO list setup from “big pile of email notifications” to something slightly more efficient (but still low tech overhead).
I used to use my email inbox as a generic TODO list, with items ranging from “reply to this person” to “remember to go to this calendar event” but also “fill out the application for this program”, “read this blog post”, and so on.
I think email inbox is still the best place to put reminders of the form “write an email to this person”. However for all the other stuff I find using email inbox quite inefficient.
Every time I scan through an email inbox with lots of items, I have to re-”compute” what that TODO item was supposed to be again. For example: “hmm, this is just a link, (I click the link), oh, it’s that blog post Person X told me about that I’ve been meaning to read”. Doing this for many items is kind of computationally expensive, no matter how clearly phrased the reminders are.
Instead, here is where I put reminders which used to be items in my inbox:
For reminders of the form “read this thing”, I have bookmark folders based on different topics. (I used to have a big bookmark folder called “To Read”, but it was too computationally expensive to figure out what was what.) The topics are relatively broad; things like “Career advice”, “Fun”, “Math”, “ML”. The idea is that usually I’m in the mood for a specific topic, so I can go to the appropriate folder and knock off some todo items.
For reminders of the form “go to this calendar event” I have been consistently using Google Calendar. The key is to really deliberately get in the habit of actually checking my calendar (I used to not do this so email was a failsafe way to remind myself to go to important things).
For reminders of the form “fill out this form / application” I make that a “this week” or “this month” TODO item in my longer term planning system (which is just a google doc since that’s been working out fine).
This system has been great since I spend way less time scanning through emails that don’t need my attention (it had really been adding up) and because it’s low-tech so it barely requires additional effort.
The case against a inbox with lots of items. This is certainly not a hot or unusual take but I am writing it anyway. I describe how I transitioned my TODO list setup from “big pile of email notifications” to something slightly more efficient (but still low tech overhead).
I used to use my email inbox as a generic TODO list, with items ranging from “reply to this person” to “remember to go to this calendar event” but also “fill out the application for this program”, “read this blog post”, and so on.
I think email inbox is still the best place to put reminders of the form “write an email to this person”. However for all the other stuff I find using email inbox quite inefficient.
Every time I scan through an email inbox with lots of items, I have to re-”compute” what that TODO item was supposed to be again. For example: “hmm, this is just a link, (I click the link), oh, it’s that blog post Person X told me about that I’ve been meaning to read”. Doing this for many items is kind of computationally expensive, no matter how clearly phrased the reminders are.
Instead, here is where I put reminders which used to be items in my inbox:
For reminders of the form “read this thing”, I have bookmark folders based on different topics. (I used to have a big bookmark folder called “To Read”, but it was too computationally expensive to figure out what was what.) The topics are relatively broad; things like “Career advice”, “Fun”, “Math”, “ML”. The idea is that usually I’m in the mood for a specific topic, so I can go to the appropriate folder and knock off some todo items.
For reminders of the form “go to this calendar event” I have been consistently using Google Calendar. The key is to really deliberately get in the habit of actually checking my calendar (I used to not do this so email was a failsafe way to remind myself to go to important things).
For reminders of the form “fill out this form / application” I make that a “this week” or “this month” TODO item in my longer term planning system (which is just a google doc since that’s been working out fine).
This system has been great since I spend way less time scanning through emails that don’t need my attention (it had really been adding up) and because it’s low-tech so it barely requires additional effort.