In my earlier blog post about getting your email inbox down to zero, GTD’er Gil asked the question, “So, what do you suggest when the problem seems to be the sheer quantity, not just mail management practices?”

There are two things I would look at:  Speed + Input

One angle to consider is to get really good and faster at processing.  Speed will be required when you’re getting tons of volume every day if you hope to get through it all without it consuming your entire day.

I think it’s also helpful to look at what you’re getting with a fresh eye, now and again.  Do you need to be getting everything you’re getting?

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If you’ve ever tasted Inbox zero, you know there’s no going back. It’s a powerful reference point in mastering GTD.  The key is knowing how you did it, and how to repeat it on a regular basis. (Yes, it’s not just about getting it there once–anyone can do that with Ctrl+A, Delete. )  The answers are all in the GTD workflow diagram. Download a free copy here.

The good news with the GTD model is that the thought process is the same no matter how something comes in (email, paper etc.) But since email plagues so many people, we’ll use that for our example.

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Eric Hanberg is a regular community contributor to GTD Times.  You can also follow his personal blog, with musings on the arts, technology and politics.

So I’ve done pretty well in the last 9 months adopting GTD into my daily life.

I’m more productive, I’m happier, and I don’t feel like I’m ducking when I haven’t done something.

But I still have not totally grappled with one of the biggest challenges of the Information Age: Continuous Partial Attention.

Thomas Friedman joked in a column that we’re no longer in the Information Age, we’re in the Age of Interruption. And it’s exactly how I was feeling, I just kept getting interrupted.

The biggest challenges were inbound emails. Last month, when I started to realize the problem, I tried a novel solution: Gmail Lab’s “Email Addict” feature. It disables access to e-mail for 15 minutes in order to let you actually get something done. Should help my productivity, right?

Ha. Right.

At first, it did feel pretty good. But then the Gmail icon in my task bar lit up and the tab changed to Gmail - Inbox (1). Ooh, a message! But I couldn’t get to it!

I tried hitting escape. I couldn’t get back into Gmail. I tried hitting escape twice. Then I tried escape and then enter. Then the space bar. Then random panicked clicking.

Then I took a deep breath and decided to be Zen. I don’t need to look at it right now anyway, I told myself.

About 2 minutes the tab changed to Gmail - Inbox (2).

I couldn’t take it. I restarted Gmail entirely. I lasted all of 4 minutes with Email Addict.

The two emails that absolutely could not wait were a two-word reply to a meeting request and a coupon to Barnes & Noble … Not exactly worth it.

My attention was getting distracted by a lot more than just e-mail. I felt like I keep getting derailed by Google Reader, pointless refreshes of Facebook, and a constant stream of tweets (sometimes even tweets from David Allen himself!). Even my Google homepage–with all the customized content I’d put on there–was interrupting me with interesting links.

But of course they were interesting links! I’d selected those widgets because I liked the content, and now I couldn’t stop clicking. That’s when it dawned on me that every single interruption I faced was an interruption that I’d actually planned and created. I was my own undoing.

I set up my phone to ding when my friends twittered. I set up three different reminders that I had e-mail. I set up reminders all over the place that the blogs, sites, and people I like had new content online.

How stupid was I being, I wondered. It’s hard enough staying focused on the web when every headline, every advertisement, and every blue-underlined word is a potential temptation to get distracted. So why had I made my life even more difficult?

There was only one solution: purge the reminders. I scrapped the widgets on my Google homepage that had outbound links and left the rest. I disabled the Gmail Notifier on my laptop and made sure that when I was working my Gmail account up in a window separate from the one I was working in–so I can’t see the tab change when e-mail arrives. I turned Twitter updates off so my phone doesn’t buzz anymore.

The aim was not to reduce the collection of content. In fact, content feels like it collects faster in my reader and inbox because I check it less frequently now. The key was to reduce all the reminders that it was there. It’s helped keep me more focused. I “flit” between web pages much less often.

The two activities that pay the bills–writing and web coding–both go much better when I’m not getting pulled away all the time.

The lesson I’ve learned is that once I got my next action list under control and scrubbed away my mental clutter, I still had a lot of virtual clutter that needed my attention too. My advice to others is the same: you don’t need all those reminders. Let Google Reader gather the links you want and open it only when you want a break. Keep your e-mail in the background. If you can, turn off the feature that displays how many unread messages are waiting for you in the dock (Mac) or menu bar (PC).

The web is one of the few places where we can really manage distractions. We are in control of what we see and when we see it. Remember, you can only handle one thing at a time, even on the web.

For an interesting read on multi-tasking, I’ll refer you to Walter Kirn’s story in the November 2007 Atlantic. This short bit is key:

Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating.

If you have an article you would like to submit to GTD Times, please let us know!

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Receipts.  If you’re like me they are one of the banes of your existence.  Especially receipts accumulated while traveling.  You know the ones I mean.  Functionally they are the equivalent of actual hard currency since they can be submitted for expense reimbursement.  The problem is that getting those receipts organized, scanned and submitted is one of the biggest pains in the butt there is for a busy person.

Of course the GTD approach to dealing with receipts is to have a designated place to collect them - most likely an envelop with a label indicating its purpose in life.  Said envelope then goes into the “To Office” traveling folder which, once you return from a trip, must be processed.

Processing receipts is a time consuming task.  Especially after a long trip - or worse, if you’ve procrastinated and thus haven’t dealt with your receipts for more than one trip and  have a couple big piles of the nasty crinkled bits of paper.

Well, if you’re in that position I don’t have any solution other than a recommendation to schedule some time to get them organized.  However, I do have a tip that could help you avoid this problem in the future.

Qipit. Developed by RealEyes3D, a visual intelligence company, Qipit turns your cell phone into a multi purpose office machine.  In short, Qipit imbues your mobile with the ability to scan documents, copy things and even capture the contents of a white board instead of having to transcribe it by hand.

In addition, Qipit also stores the items you capture so that you have a secure online repository for everything you scan making it easy to access your stored documents from anywhere with a working web connection.

Particularly when traveling this can make your life a lot easier.  For example, with the above mentioned receipts all you have to do is lay them out on a flat surface, center them in the viewfinder of your mobile phone’s camera, click off a photo and email it from your phone to “copy@qipit.com”.  Within a few moments the scanned, corrected image will appear in your Qipit account.  From there it can be faxed, emailed, published to a blog or other site or simply stored until later.

Qipit is fairly amazing - not only because it makes tasks like the one above fast and nearly painless but also because of how it handles images.  For example, I just shot a receipt with my Nokia N96 - this is a five megapixel camera phone.  Check out the image:

Now look at what Qipit did with this same receipt:

in addition to making it easy to orient the item correctly, it also cleaned up the shadows in the foreground and the background and corrected the contrast making it much easier to read.  Qipit also dramatically reduced the size of the file so that it could be emailed quickly and easily, even in a bandwidth constrained environment.

Another way that Qipit can make your life easier - especially on the road - is when you have to sign and fax something.  I just love these requests.  Not the least because I no longer own a fax machine and I can’t stand shelling out like $5 per page to send a fax from a hotel.  (Doesn’t anyone use E-Signatures these days?)

Luckily Qipit solves this problem too.  Just sign the document that you need to return then take a photo of it with your camera phone.  Email it to “copy@qipit.com” and then log on to your Qipit account.  From there you can specify if the document should be published, emailed. or for those dinosaurs still living the the Web .5 world, you can fax them the document.  One more headache averted.

Like most of our best-loved applications, Qipit is free and offers a generous amount of storage for your scanned images.  And, as easy as Qipit makes it to get your receipts scanned while on the road no you have no excuse for not getting them cleaned up in two minute slots while you’re traveling. See, I told you I could solve that problem for you, didn’t I?

I

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I love reading good prose, particularly a good narrative. Sometimes prose is called for in an email — to tell a story, explain your reasoning, provide some depth regarding your feelings on a topic, etc. Some people prefer the phone or face-to-face for those things, but in many situations, email is sufficient.

But many of the emails we send and receive every day aren’t this kind of content. They are instead heavily task-oriented — all about coordinating our work with other people. For these kind of emails, straight prose is generally a much less effective form of communication.

Over the years, as I’ve worked with people on communicating more effectively via email, I’ve observed that when people include more than one topic (even just two) in an email, all too often the recipient only replies to one of the topics. Then the sender has to reply back asking again about the overlooked issues.

Most people scan their email — they don’t read it closely. As a result, if there are action items, or items for which a specific response is expected from the other person, that needs to be clearly communicated in the email in a way that will still be effective knowing the recipient will likely just scan the email.

The solution? Numbered lists.

List each item that requires response or action with a number in front of it. You can then write a whole paragraph if you need to, but the numbered list accomplishes a couple of things:

1. Recipients are clearer as to what’s expected of them in terms of actions and responses. They can’t claim that it was buried in the email if it was specifically enumerated.
2. Recipients are less likely to skip an item when they respond. With the numbers, it’s easier to check for completeness of our response. If there are five items in the email, there should be five items in your response. I don’t claim this to be scientific — I just know it works.
3. If they skip an item, it’s easier to communicate back to them about it. “Thanks for your response, but what about item #2?” No retyping — just a single simple question.

A few tips:

1. Numbers work better than bullets. I don’t have quantitative data on this, but I can tell you that both for myself and with my clients, I first tried using bulleted lists, and that was a noticeable improvement over prose, but people still tended to skip items. But with numbered lists, skipped items in responses fall to almost zero. Apparently, without the numbers, our brain kind of loses place. Also, you lose advantage #3 above.
2. Bolding the start of each item helps. Whether it’s complete sentences or just a phrase as a pseudo-header, bold-facing the beginning of each item improves scannability.
3. Two items constitutes a list. How often have you sent an email with two questions for the other person and they only reply to one of them? It happens, and numbering them helps prevent it.
4. One list item = one action item. It doesn’t do much good to create a list if each list item has two or three questions or separate actions. Break it down.

This clearly isn’t appropriate for every email, even those longer than a paragraph, but in the proper context, this has been a great tool for me and my clients in reducing email traffic and confusion. Try it for yourself and see.

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