Comments on: The Rule of Ten

By: YinYanger

YinYanger — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 17:20:49 +0000

Just use Opera for Mac and you can use its custom filters + labels!! You can put a single e-mail into several custom filters (for projects) and use the label (category) to set its status

By: David Evans

David Evans — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 17:53:08 +0000

GTD has a great PDF of the optimum workflow that I pasted to my wall. 50 items in inbox max. As an aside there is no good task manager for OSX so I fired up MovableType 3.11 and created categories and sub categories in a ToDo blog. Now I just have to tweak the templates to keep “hot” items at the top and a few new fields for “status”, links to external files, etc. Perhaps someone will write a killer plug-in to improve upon this idea.

By: Abel G

Abel G — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 15:32:57 +0000

I find very usefull to label emails with colors and have logical views for every label, as thunderbird or opera mail does.

By: Susan Mernit

Susan Mernit — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 14:59:57 +0000

Yes,I struggle with how to file active items in email–and get uneasy after about 40.
My clumsy solution is to save the emails as text files in a take action folder, just to get them out of the mail queue.

By: MikeM

MikeM — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 13:18:46 +0000

"does anyone have a better way?"

The best 3 days I have had in weeks were days I did not turn the computer on. One day I took the kids to the Aquarium in Monterey and the other two I headed up into the Sierra foothills to look at land for sale.

By: Jeremy Zawodny

Jeremy Zawodny — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 07:00:38 +0000

10?

Ha!

I'm trying to keep it under 100 and it's really, really hard.

By: Cory Doctorow

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 06:37:52 +0000

Another vote for Getting Things Done — Atkins for your to-do list.

By: Dan

Dan — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 06:00:40 +0000

Similar to Bill's post, with the further description that I keep separate Task folders in Outlook (right now I just have Work and Personal but have had greater granularity in the past), and when I create a new task I drag the email item to the body of the task item, which removes it from my inbox. At the start of each day I then print out my Task lists and prioritize them for that day and sometimes hand-write new ones that come up, which then get transcribed to Outlook at the end of the day.

Its a decent system, but unfortunately I don't always follow it every day...

By: nxdecybot

nxdecybot — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 05:56:38 +0000

To deal with this I have tried many methods, the only one that has worked for me is using the Opera M2 mail client.

As mails come in that I cannot immediately respond to, I right-click LABEL them into a category filter (to do, call back, important, etc...). This is a very rapid operation that I can do immediately after scanning the message in the preview window.

Then instead of dealing with a list that is ordered by time of receipt in my inbox, I can deal with things BY CATEGORY using the incredible filtering technology - kind of like an Outlook 2003 search folder but better - Opera M2 filters support regex!

The alternative solution is to recognize that you are a "victim of e-mail tyranny" see here for six steps towards improving your life:

http://www.w-uh.com/articles/030308-tyranny_of_email.html

BTW you filtered my nickname which includes the word rhymes-with-prude and starts with "N". I am disappointed. In any case to contact me please replace the X with a U.

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 26 Oct 2004 05:27:17 +0000

I obey exactly the same rule, except that in my case it's the Rule of 10,000.