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Announcing the end of e-mail overload (and start of Gootodo.com)
Mar 9, 2006
Today, Thursday, March 9, 2006, marks the end of an era: that of e-mail overload. Starting today, you have no reason to labor any more under the stress, irritation, and fear caused by a bulging inbox.
The cure is here. I am declaring the start of the "bit literacy" era... and offering every knowledge worker in the world a discipline, and a tool, to overcome their information overload, manage their bits, and lead a more productive, less stressful life with more time for genuinely important things like family and friends.
- The discipline: empty the e-mail inbox - get it to a message count of zero - at least once a day. Details in managing incoming e-mail (PDF report):
(It works. I've begun conducting e-mail management seminars, to executives and organizations, teaching this method. Minutes before sending this newsletter, I received this e-mail from a senior executive, at a West Coast company that we all know, who attended a recent seminar of mine:)
I am THRILLED to tell you that you have changed my life. I have lived with the yoke of email for the last several years of my career... For the first time in my life I am on top of my email and feel an incredible weight off my shoulders. I am sure I am going to live longer. I'm not joking! You are wonderful! Thank you.
- The tool: I hereby announce that I have finally opened my Good Experience todo list - Gootodo - for public signup, starting with a 30-day free trial. Sign up here: Gootodo.com
Every human being now with an e-mail program, and $3 per month for the best e-mail management tool ever created, can work and live in full control of their e-mail, permanently.
You might ask what a todo list has to do with ending e-mail overload, and why this todo list is so important, given that there are many other todo list programs available today. The answer requires a bit of context.
For years Web users have labored under the strain of poorly designed e-mail programs, way too much incoming e-mail, and the stress of not knowing how to deal with it all. As a result, knowledge workers have been working in unhealthy ways, and the global economy (I believe) has failed to fulfill its promises of increased productivity from the massive IT investments of the 1990s.
For the past ten years I've developed the "bit literacy" philosophy of letting go of bits, of attaining clarity by working from emptiness. In an age of infinite bits, the only way to survive is to carve paths of emptiness, not trying to consume ever greater quantities of bits.
The beachhead for this effort is the e-mail inbox, the primary (not the only) source of stress for knowledge workers. People simply don't know how to deal with e-mail. It's not because they're dumb; it's because the tools are poorly designed (Outlook, Notes, Eudora, and the rest weren't designed in the age of bits and were never meant to be used in an environment where e-mail is as important as it is today) - and, more importantly, because no one has ever taught users how to deal with the bits.
Twenty years ago, the technology industry, and society, invested untold resources in teaching users "computer literacy" skills - how to use a mouse, menus, and windows. Now is the time to teach the world bit literacy.
It starts with the e-mail method:
1. Read all FYI's, either file them or don't, but then definitely delete them from the inbox.
2. Take care of all quick action items (two minutes or less) right now... then delete them from the inbox.
3. The only items left at this point are meaty action items that take longer than 2 minutes - perhaps up to several weeks or months. Simply move these to a proper todo list, then delete them from the inbox.
At this point the inbox will be at a count of zero - empty! - at which time you can really begin to work productively... by working from your todo list, not a jumbled inbox.
Bit literacy doesn't exist without a proper todo list. With the launch of Gootodo, the missing piece is now available to all Web users - and so the era of e-mail overload comes to an end.
When I've described this to executives recently, the next question is always: what's a proper todo list, and where can I get one? (No one uses the Outlook task bar - its design is abysmal.)
This, below, is a description of a proper todo list. Pay attention, because even if you don't start using Gootodo, your primary todo list will most likely exhibit all of these qualities within a few years... (most todo lists today have some of these features, but I'm saying that the technology industry will inevitably follow Gootodo's lead, whether they name it or not, to offer all of them):
1. Summary and detail view (i.e. the ability to hide or expose details)
2. Priority within a day (i.e. the ability to re-order items up or down the list within a day)
3. View of today's todos only, and the ability to send todos to the future (where we won't see them on today's todo list)... and automatic roll-over, at midnight, of any undone todos to tomorrow
4. One single list of todos - not several lists (which require the user to consider which list something might be on, adding another layer of management and hence stress)
5. E-mail tie-in (allowing users to forward e-mails to future days on the todo list - or BCC themselves to create a check-in reminder in the future)... this little trick of "mailing the future" is the single most important aspect of Gootodo and can save you minutes or hours every day.
All of these are now available at Gootodo.com.
Again: today, Thursday 9 March, I'm happy to announce the public 30-day free trial of Gootodo - the Good Experience todo list - available to everyone on the Internet.
Enjoy - and have a goo' time!
(I'm writing this from San Diego, where I'm about to present this at the O'Reilly ETech conference, so please excuse my writing this in haste...)
How well does Gootodo handle a user who has different ISPs for Internet and e-mail, both using a dialup connection on a mutually exclusive basis? I admit I'm in the vast minority here, but I'm wondering whether this use case was even considered.
Looks and sounds awesome. However, I just want to check that the sign-up page is secure (or meant to be) before I plug in my credit card number.
Vicki - Secure server coming soon - almost certainly within the next week.
Dick - Yes, you can use it (and e-mail to it) from different accounts. Just go into your Preferences and set it up.
Sounds great Mark, but tried to sign up and got an empty PHP page. No error messages or anything.
That error, combined with the lack of a secure server is a bit worrying.
I'm sure you guys will get it straightened out.
Mark--
Looks great, but you have missed some points well known to practitioners of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" methodology (www.davidco.com).
Multiple to-do lists: you already have multiple to-do lists, and for good reason. The grocery list on your refrigerator door is a to-do list that could be titled "At the Food Market". Similarly, you would do well to have other context-dependent lists labeled "At the Office", "At Home", "Calls", "Errands", "At the Boat" (if you have a boat), etc. (Note that not everything boat-related goes on the At Boat list, just things that must be done there -"grease winches", for example. "Call agent about boat insurance" belongs on your Calls list.)
What's the point of sitting in your office looking at a single all-too-long list cluttered up with the likes of "get cat food" and "grease winches" that you can't act on in your present context?
Another important GTD concept is the notion of separating out the Next Action from a multi-step to-do, or project. Thus, "Submit new Budget" is not a Next Action, it belongs on a Projects list; the Next Action might be "Call acctg for last year's budget"--to be put on your Calls list. (All context-list to-dos should be Next Actions--possible to do without prerequisite actions.)
There's more. Particularly useful (and novel) is "Waiting For", a list of deliveries expected, subscriptions to start, rebates to arrive, etc. Also "Someday/Maybe" for parking things you want not to forget but are not yet committed to doing.
Finally, setting priorities is a waste of time. The only priority that counts is selection of the next thing you are going to do; the best way to do that is by looking at all the candidate actions possible in your present context and picking the one to do. Whatever rank you might assign to all the rest will be obsolete by the next time you look at the list. (When you come back, if you look only at the previously assigned A list, you may miss the need to elevate a B list item to A; if you are going to have to look at the B list, why bother to assign As and Bs?)
it's not a beta? a credit card? I have to cancel? give us a shot at this and we might have some ideas - isn't that the way it works? lol sorry I missed you at etech