Well, in the short series of posts related to my GTD adventures, here comes a very little one, about my email setup. I use Apple’s Mail.app, I was an Evolution / Kmail user on the Linux world for years, so the quite spartan interface was no problem for me.

The actual setup is like you see in the left picture: I have only 4 folders (or mailboxes, as Mail.app calls them), corresponding to 4 processes I need to apply to each message that comes into my Inbox.

So, here’s the drill: anything that comes into Inbox and must be asnwered ASAP, but it takes longer than 2 minutes, goes into “Answer ASAP” folder.

Anything that must be done sometime, but I don’t know yet if I would do it and how, goes into “Sometime Maybe” folder.

All the other stuff, including personal meesages, business messages, clients or employees, friends or other people I know, are hierarchically organized into “Reference” folder (the structure is not shown).

The “Waiting for” folder is used for informations that needs other’s actions to complete. Including quotation requests, business opportunities, or delegated tasks. Whenever I delegate a task to somebody, I BCC my self, and the resulting message is moved into the “Waiting For” folder. I know about Mail Tags, but I found it a little bit heavier for my needs. I don’t use email so much, that it could take over the “normal” GTD application, and I don’t want to get there either ;-). Mail is just a part of my daily activity and I don’t want to become one of the largest. So, keeping it simple and merciless, makes my day “email hassle free”, and my mind “like water” ;-).

In other words: it just works.

[tags]GTD, email, Mail.app[/tags]