You may have heard or, better yet, read, the brilliant book by David Allen called Getting Things Done – The Art of Stress-Free Productivity.
Known widely as ‘GTD’, Allen’s methodology for staying on top of all the information, tasks and commitments in our lives consists of a number of simple but effective principles. (You can read a primer on GTD here.)
One of Allen’s GTD principles is optimising (which usually means reducing) the number of ‘collection buckets’ we have in our life. ‘Collection buckets’ are places we have to check to see what we have to do next, or tomorrow, or next week, and so on. It’s all about getting things out of our heads and recorded externally. This frees up ‘brain space’ for real thinking, rather than thinking (and re-thinking) about all the things you must remember to do. This includes tasks (and project plans) that are on paper, on your computer, on your smart phone, on your wall, on the back of your hand, and so on.
There are a number of very good reasons why your email inbox is not well suited to being one of these collection buckets. Email was simply not designed to be a task or ‘to do’ list. It doesn’t do it very well.
Ever had something ‘fall through the cracks’, only to later find it buried deep in your inbox amidst many other not-nearly-as-important emails?
We won’t go into all the reasons in this article (read the GTD book to fully understand it) but for now accept that you need a dedicated Tasks list outside of your email inbox. In a workplace context, this Task list also needs to facilitate tracking tasks you have delegated to others, as well as tasks that are in the ‘Someday, maybe’ category with no hard and fast due date as yet.
Importantly, your Tasks list also needs to be a centrally stored, shareable, filterable and keyword searchable Tasks list so that it’s not only on your computer. It’s vital that your work colleagues can see what’s on your list, in case you’re away, sick or otherwise incapacitated, and just generally to facilitate better information sharing and collaboration within your team.
If you accept that there’s a need to get things out of your email inbox and onto your Tasks list, that begs the question, how can that be done as quickly and efficiently as possible?
We firmly believe that you need a Tasks list system that is integrated with your organisation’s centralised Email Management System where all emails are stored. The Email Management System must be integrated with your overall Document Management System (email is, after all, just one type of document) and must link in with the email inbox system your organisation uses, such as Microsoft Outlook.
We designed HowNow to tick all these boxes.
Let’s step you through the process from getting an actionable email from your inbox onto your Tasks list when you use HowNow …
When you send or receive an email, you are prompted ‘Would you like to add this email to HowNow?’ Click ‘Yes’ and complete a brief filing wizard and the email is then stored centrally under the relevant contact or area. At this point the email is now stored in the Document Management System. (In HowNow terminology, that’s the Records screen.)
To create a Task off the back of such an email you right-click the email and select Create Follow Up Task. You then select the person who is to complete that Task and a Due Date, and the Task is added to that person’s Tasks list in HowNow. Simple. The Task automatically includes a link back to the original email.
The following is a video showing how easy this is to do. Note that this video was recorded on a ‘real life’ HowNow within an accounting firm, not just on a ‘demo version’, hence the appearance of a firm name and some particulars.:
It’s doesn’t get much simpler than that.
Or does it?
In HowNow version 3.2 which is to be released in early 2010, the filing of the email and the creation of the Follow Up Task can be done in the one step.
As we say, “HowNow, how easy!”
