It’s been 3 months since my concerted effort to be more organized and productive. Some pretty good progress.

• Email Inbox: 0
• Flagged Emails: 0
• Flagged Newreader Items: 0
• ‘Clean Out’ directory contains: 12 items
• Physical Inbox: ignored
• 43 Folders: ignored

As I mentioned in my previous post, every next action is goes into the stack of index cards. Works pretty well. The trick I’ve found is being specific, start with a verb, use between 5 and 10 words. If the note doesn’t start with a verb, too much thinking when you get down to doing. Fewer than 5 words is too few to be specific and more than 10 and it’s probably more than one next action.

Overall, the big a-ha is to be liberal with what defines a project. Again, as David Allen recommends, if it has more than one Next Action – it’s a project.

Once I made that shift in my thinking, filing email and cleaning out my other inboxes goes extremely quickly.