20. Listener questions: Getting email to Zero with GTD, Time blocking

Transcript

Automatically transcribed and lightly edited. Timestamps omitted for readability.

Morten: Hi, and welcome to another episode of the Getting Things Done podcast from the GTD Nordic. I am Morten Røvik, and I'm here with my friend and colleague Lars Rothschild Henriksen. Hi, Lars.

Lars: Hi, Morten. Happy to be back again and looking forward to recording another episode. And I think this will be a good one. If you are new to this podcast, our goal is to support you in using GTD to clear your mind, become more productive, less stressed, and really be present with whatever you're doing, whether it's at work or at home. And we hope that you find these episodes valuable regardless of your experience with GTD. And if you want a refresher or want to learn the basics in GTD, then we recommend you go back to episodes 1 through 6 and listen through those. That's where we cover the basics of managing your work.

Morten: Yeah, great. And today's topic is listener questions. We've gotten 2 questions we decided to answer in this episode. We have one question about email management and one about what?

Lars: Yeah, so the question we got from a listener in the US, David Drake, he said, you guys always have a great podcast. So thanks. Thanks for that, David. As an avid GTD user, I would like to see a podcast on project planning and time blocking. For people who have multiple large projects, it's important to protect your time and block some time off. How do you do this in GTD? That was his question. And if I, if I should start to answer that one, I think the project planning perspective, I think the starting point in GTD is really the natural planning model. And we already covered that in a previous episode. So that would be my starting point for the more complex episodes. But what we haven't spoken that much about, I think, is the time blocking part of the question. How do you then make time for this? Because it's always an interesting question when we, at least here in Denmark, and I'm sure it's the case for you in Norway as well, to sit down and talk with the people that we coach or the people that attend the seminars. If they need to go in and block out time in their calendar, and it will vary so much from person to person. You know, when we do open seminars, you You can ask one person, then the next, and they will have completely different calendars. Some people have wide open calendars and some people have very full calendars. So the question, is it necessary to block out time? The answer to that really is, it depends. And oftentimes for me, it comes back to the company culture and how many meetings they attend to, how much they are invited to, how much stuff do they need to discuss before they start doing things.. And then, so that's often an interesting reflection to do, to look at the calendar to see if they should make any changes to that. And one aspect I think is interesting to look at that I also just recently wrote a bit about on LinkedIn actually this week was to really take care of your calendar, be nice to it. It really is, you know, the hard landscape of the day as we would call it.. And it really is a critical list to maintain and weed out. So do you have enough time to process your incoming stuff, emails and things? Do you have time for your meetings? Do you have time to prepare for your meetings? Do you have time for handling all the unplanned work? Because you know that's going to show up. And the more experience that I get with working with people here in Denmark, the more I see the amount of unplanned work actually Even rising, I think, over the past 5 years that we've worked with this. It really is, it seems to be growing, or at least the people that attend the seminars come and tell me that they have, you know, a significant part of their day, maybe 50%. I had a medical company recently saying 70% of their day was unplanned. So it really, so how does that match your calendar? Is there 70% free time? Because that's what you're telling me before you then have time to even get to your planned work and managing inputs. So, it really is necessary to maintain that list. And yeah, so with regards to blocking time, yes, if you need it. And for me, I would do that as part of my weekly review. If I see a deadline approaching, I would be checking my calendar to see, do I have enough time or do I need to start blocking out time if someone is looking to steal my time? I think that's where I would go with it.

Morten: What about you, Morten? Well, I use time blocking for as you would do in, David would call it the hard landscape to prioritize. You start as.

Lars: Your prioritization, how you say this?

Morten: Prioritization. Thank you. Tool. And especially when I find myself, and we all do, let's just admit it, time to time we procrastinate things we don't find very either important enough or maybe things you find a little boring challenging, taxing. I used my calendar as an anti-procrastination tool by blocking out some time to do that little thing because I know I must make it. And, you know, if I block out an hour, set aside time for doing this, that helps me to prioritize it. Hey, I managed to say it now. Fantastic. No, but, and And also, if you look at your workload, it's either you must plan work, you must do predefined work, or you will do ad hoc work, work that shows up. And depending on your areas of focus and responsibility, you must make some qualified decisions on how much time you should use in a different category. And if you Don't make that upfront. It's very difficult to make that when you're in the weeds, when things happen, some colleague comes and knocks your door and trying to call you for and take your attention. So time blocking can also be a prioritization tool as this by taking— you decided this is very important, I will set aside time to make this and then make yourself unavailable in your calendar and maybe even go off doing go somewhere else to do your work, to be uninterrupted. So it's, I think if you look at the complexity that we maneuver in these days, it's fast-paced, changing all the time. Often for many people, it's, they feel they're running after what's happening instead of being in front of it. And to become in front of it, you have to set aside time to reflect and to crack those nuts. That are a little harder to crack. So time blocking for me is to set aside time for anti-procrastination. And I also use it for planning projects. When I need to plan a project that I haven't planned, we are training new trainers in the Nordic region now. We have 5 new trainers coming aboard this spring. And I had to set aside time to plan this because it's a lot of next action, next action, next action, next action, next action. And then finally, when that 2 hours or whatever I set aside is over, I make a bookmark. Where are you now? What is the next action after this? And then I just leave it. Is it a way of really moving fast forward on a project also? So, and I got something to add on this.

Lars: No, I think we, we covered it. I mean, you can always dive into more details on how to, to manage these, and there's, uh, in some cases it, you know, from David's question, it could also sound like some traditional project management approaches would also make sense to, to take into consideration. And then the question is how to integrate those with your own GCD system, but I think that's maybe a topic for another podcast.

Morten: And that And just to be clear that GTD don't talk about time blocking as such. There's just next actions, but also that if you want to speed up a project, you need to give it more attention. And speeding up a project would be, for instance, setting aside time in your calendar to work on it and to birth the project and then start moving on it if it's urgent or you must make quicker dances on this. Okay, I think we've answered David's question. I hope, David, that you feel we've given you something that's of value, and the other listeners as well, of course. But then we move on to Pål Vålespekeland in Norway who has a question. He says, "Thank you for a fantastic podcast on GTD." I'm thankful for those words. We like people like what we do, that's why we are doing it. We love giving value to you and thank you for writing to us. And he asks, he writes a lengthy email explaining he's a project manager and a UX designer for a company who produces web pages and bigger systems for web. And he has questions about email. And I'm trying to boil it down in a couple of questions. So do you have techniques for not being distracted by the inbox and new emails? And then, how do you write emails fast? When should you read email? And any tips for use of email on a computer, time strategy around emails is of interest. So like, this is a broad topic and let's try and dive into this, Loris. I have some techniques for this. What are yours for not being distracted by your inbox when you're working there.

Lars: Or when you don't work there at all? Yeah, so first of all, I think it's always, you know, email is probably the number one topic that comes up. How do we manage that in a better way? And I just find it interesting that people always say they get a lot of emails regardless of whether they get 30 emails per day or 200. They always get a lot of emails. And, you know, managing emails is just like any other inbox. So as I would sit down at my desk where I'm sitting now at the office, what would I do? Well, I have the options that we actually just spoke about in the question from David. Do I want to do planned work? Do I want to do some unplanned work? The stuff that might have shown up, but I haven't gotten into my system yet. Or do I want to do some defining work? What makes sense to me right now. So I would, if the latter option is the right choice for me, then I would go into my inbox and get it to zero. And I think what has helped me most recently, at least in becoming more effective in managing this, is to become better at integrating emails into my task list. So I use Gmail and I use Todoist for managing my lists at the moment. And there's a nice plugin. So when I have an email that I need to do an action on in one way or another, I can hit the button, I can type in the next action, I can do my shortcut codes, and then I can just hit enter and then archive that email. So recently I've become a lot more efficient in quickly getting to Xero. So for me, both the quick integration with getting that email out of your inbox and into your system, that that was one helpful part, but certainly the other way around, not giving too much attention to email was the other thing that helped me because now I was working from my list rather than in my system. So for me, that made a lot of sense to make that change. So I think that was a good starting point for me.

Morten: What about you, Mun? No, I agree with you totally. And I see often when we coach people, when I one-on-one and talk to people about emails, that they use their email inbox as a task list. And if you only have 2 minutes for emails, that's okay. Unless you're kind of swamped with 2 minutes and you're not doing anything else but 2 minutes. But I would like to zoom out a little, to start a little broader approaching this topic. Because as David would say, is that when you start your day, where should you start? Advocates, and I totally agree with him, that you should start in your calendar, your hard landscape. What have I committed to do today, maybe tomorrow? How does my days look now today? And then move on to your lists. See what— if I have some, you know, some weird time in between, I have an hour, what could I fill that hour with depending on where I am, what I have?. You go to your contacts, you make some— get yourself an idea of what you could do if you have some spare time in between your meetings or in your calendar items. And then after you have this overview, you open your email because then you will see what you have committed to do today, what could I do if I wanted to, and what has come in since the last time I checked my email or I clarified and organized my email. And that, that will give you the right in the the right, what do you call it, order of things. And if you— you can actually do this automatically in Outlook. You can go for File, Alternatives, Advanced, I think, and then find the folder where Outlook would start, and then you could change for Calendar and then close or make OK. This, and then next time you start Outlook, you don't start an email, you start in the calendar. That has a lot more peace, a lot more peaceful environment than how you would start in your email because then you're sucked into email. I don't know about you, but if I start reading emails, kind of like, or just wanted to clarify and organize them, it's kind of like you're sucked into there and you don't come out unless you're, when you're before you're finished, and maybe you should have an overview of everything else that you could do that day or you've committed to do that day. So that's a good place to start, I think. And then, do you have any techniques for not being distracted by emails and new emails? And then I would like to start and zoom out again for when you have emails coming to you. Historically, if you had an email address for a while, there's a lot of email coming because you signed up for this and you signed up for that. And then you don't have a conscious relationship to whatever comes in. Then my first suggestion is get conscious and cut as much of the inflow as possible that you can get away with. For instance, do you have a newsletter you don't read anymore? You kind of like go numb to it, you delete it or you just archive it and you think, "I will read it later," but you never do it, then maybe it's time to get off that. David says, "Have your attention or have your attention." If you don't have your email, you're not tentative about or you look at your email with attention, they will take more attention than they deserve also as your thoughts as well. So your mental capacity is everything that comes in front of your eyes or into your conscience is stealing your energy. So if you're going to get more of the right stuff done, get all the craft and the crap out of your email first. So get off all your email newsletters. You don't have to have all people send you emails you don't want to have. Tell them or spam them. Puts spam so you don't have to see it, you know, what you can spike, mark them as spam. And then when you've got that inflow as much as possible, then you might want to do what I call deflect email, which means for every email that's FYI, for your information only, for instance, email you are CC'd on, And if you haven't done this already, you should tell your organization, everybody around you, that if you put me on CC, it means it's for my information only. For my information only. There's no action required of me. If you want to have required action from me, put my email address in the, in the To field, not the Copy field. Yeah. So then maybe you want to make a folder called CC email and then automatically make rules in Outlook or Gmail, all this. Services have email rules so you can automatically route them outside your inbox and straight into a folder called maybe CC, carbon copy. And you have some— some of you will have reports, some what we call read and review emails that comes to you. There are some documents you have to look at. And then if you committed to read them, you should put them in maybe a read later folder so you don't have to look at them right now. They will go into the folder and make sure that you have one of these. You will have a number for each email you have in there, so you will see that there is something not finished here. That's a good way of getting things out of your eyes. And I use— when I explain this to people, this is, if you only have emails, you really have to clarify and organize in your email, you obtain what I call email nirvana. Because if you imagine you only have the emails you really have to clarify and organize, you must make a decision on them. That is a different ballgame than having all the crap you don't have to make decisions on taking your mental capacity. And for me, who's a low reader, email is hard for me to read. Really takes mental horsepower. And I get really tired if you sent me a lengthy email, especially if you're unclear. Don't do that. I will thank you verbally at least after. So, but if you imagine if you have an email where you only have the emails you really need to make a decision on, that's a lot easier to handle. And out of maybe the 50 emails you get every day, maybe there's 15 you really have to make a decision on. Should I reply to this or not? What should I do? What's my next action here? So Do you have any other.

Lars: Strategies in this? No, that's it. Those are very, very good, very good tips. I think one, one note on the folder to read later. I used to use that as well, but what I found was that I would, would not read it later. So I would have a folder, but that was more of a, might as well have been an archive stuff that I would want to be able to get back to. So like everything else with GTD, you know, figure out how to make it work for you. And that was one thing that I had to remove from my system because.

Morten: I was not diligent about attending to it. Yeah. And I don't know if we will get banned from Apple Podcasts for saying this, but this is a word I use when I tell people you need to engage your bullshit filter when you start, you know, really My son taught me this word, it's called seriously. In Norwegian it's serios. And this is, you must engage your bullshit filter and tell your brain, really, am I going to read this later? Or am I just kind of being a hamster trying to, and I have fear of missing out something, I should read this. Or really, really am I seriously, am I committed to read this? If you can't answer that truthfully, then just, you know, delete the email, don't— or get off that list, or route the emails to your deleted items. If you need to get it, you have 30 days to find it normally, even if you delete it, so— or archive it.

Lars: Other than that, you know, it— yes, some basic, you know, tools, shortcuts can really just be very, very helpful. So we set up a lot of people in Outlook because that's That's the primary mail application used in Denmark, and things such as the Outlook Quick Steps can be really helpful for people. You can assign shortcuts to them. You can actually do some pretty cool stuff in the newer versions. So certainly I would want to look into that. And also a lot of people will challenge me when I say, you know, you need to disconnect. You know, you want to empty your inbox and have that as a separate task to do, and then you will want to disconnect. But then they will say, well, actually I do a lot of my I work in Outlook. I send emails, I schedule things. Well, then go in and find the button called Work Offline. That is an amazing, very important button to be aware of. That simply just cuts the internet connection from Outlook. So you can still do almost all of the work. There's some, you know, group email group management and some server-side stuff that you're not able to do, but most of the stuff you're able to do. And most importantly, you're able to cut the flow of emails that are maybe stealing your attention. And the same thing in Gmail. I've recently started to use Boomerang to pause my inbox so I don't get my interruptions in there. And I think you use another tool in Gmail, Martin?

Morten: Yes, I use something called Inbox When Ready. It's a Chrome extension. Just to give people why should you consider using anything for this. It's like if you are easily distracted like me, I have an unread email. Oh, what's that? And I'm automatically attracted to it. And especially if I'm in procrastination mode, that's very easy to go in there. So I have to limit my distractions. And then Inbox When Ready is a plugin where I will— I turned off, of course, the Chrome show the number of email in the Chrome Tab. Of course, this is off, and then I have this inbox when ready where I can then hide my inbox. You get a button says Show Inbox, and when you click it, it opens, shows you your unread email or all your email in the inbox. And you can set schedules for when this happens. You can auto-hide your inbox. You can have what you call an impulse check time budgets and you can schedule your lockouts. So you can say, I know email between 9 and 12, which is good for those. Well, I don't use that. I just, I'm not, I'm not there yet, but I'm, I'm have a show and hide inbox so that I can write an email without seeing the emails coming in, which is distraction-free working. This is what I need. Yeah. And then I wanted to just address something before we, um, close this episode. We are on the 24-minute mark, 25 soon. Just for taking us out, is the folder structure. People ask all the time, should I have a folder structure for structuring email? And my answer to that is, if you feel that you need it. Yeah. And the search functions now has become really good, so it's possible to just remember some, a couple of keywords. And if you really are diligent of deleting irrelevant emails and you only have the archivable emails left where it really did have some future value for you in your archive, then you can more easily search. But if you have a huge backlog of email in your archive that you haven't deleted, maybe it's difficult to make that search. So is it good or bad? It's neither. It depends. Just make sure you don't make productivity pornography, as they would call it, where you are more attracted to fiddling with your system, making folders and color-coding them than actually doing the work. Ask yourself, does this folder structure help me become more productive, or is it just a way for me to.

Lars: Suck my thumb? Yeah, no, I can certainly relate to that. And I, it's often fun to discuss when talking to people in coaching or in workshops because people tend to have a really strong commitment to how they manage their system. And this is, you know, these are habits that are formed typically over several years. And what I found for myself when I started working the system was that I had set up a huge folder structure and I was diligent in maintaining it., but I never really used it, so it really didn't make sense for me to maintain. And I think some people will also recognize that, you know, they have worked with Outlook for so many years, and in previous versions of Outlook, like 2007 and earlier, the search functionality was just really, really bad. So, so they had to do this organization, but now, like you just said, there's the, the search functionality is so much better. So for the most part, you know, you can, can manage with very few folders. And I think David once mentioned that he had maybe, you know, 40, 50 or something like that folders. I have one. I have my archive. I search everything that I need. And so that makes it so much quicker for me to get to inbox zero because I didn't use that structure anyway. So for me, it doesn't make sense.

Morten: To set that up. No, what I use for— I actually use folders quite actively, but I'm very diligent in cleaning up in them. And I have what I call action support folders where I put things that are relevant to a project. And then I archive them as the project is finished. I archive that. It's a label in Gmail or folder on Outlook. And then I archive the folder when I'm finished with the project. So it's possible. And I also use folders for things I don't need to see immediately. Like my FII and read when ready, read later things. Okay, I think we exhausted this now. There's another question, but maybe for another day, is writing email fast. We have some ideas for this. Maybe we should save that for a later episode.

Lars: So tease.

Morten: That for another episode. Yes, yes, yes. So, okay. I hope you feel that we've answered your questions. Please send us more questions. We liked it. We like answering them, and keep them coming, please.

Lars: Yeah, agree. And also one last note from my end is to be sure to check out the setup guides in general. So have a look on the web shops, on the Danish website, on the Norwegian website, on gettingthingsdone.com if you're outside the Nordic countries, to look for the for the setup guides there. You know, the response from people is always that they benefit from these. They really, you know, you get a head start and you get so much good information in those setup guides. So highly recommend to go in there and buy them. The value you get is really, is certainly worth it.

Morten: But remember, you don't learn GTD from a tool, you learn GTD from the.

Lars: Book or a seminar or wherever. Yeah. And let me transition on that one to where you can find more information about that, because that is gtdnordic.com for the Nordic countries. You'll find each of the country websites there.

Morten: Can I interrupt you and tell you, tell people that we have a brand new website at gtdnordic.com. We refreshed it. It's, if you like it, go and have a look and tell us what you like and what you don't like.

Lars: Good point. Yeah. Yeah. So, and you'll find the country websites from there and there you will find the seminars, coaching, you'll find the different groups. Groups that we have, Meetup groups or groups on social media, and you'll find more information about everything, newsletter articles, it's all, all in there on gtdnordic.com is the, is the starting point. And as mentioned in the beginning, really hope you find these episodes valuable. And if you do, we'd really appreciate it if you share a podcast with.

Morten: A colleague or rate us on iTunes. Okay, thank you everybody for listening. Bye bye.

Lars: Until next time, be productive.

Morten: Bye everyone.