I’m a habitual non-deleter of mail when it hits my inbox. I mean, sure, I delete the crap and mark the spam pretty regularly but when it is a message that requires action or a response and I don’t have time to do it right now, I’ll let it sit.

And sit it does.

Usually one of three things happen at this point. Most likely I’ll reply / perform the action required to clear this message in the next few days. If it gets beyond this point, though, bad things happen. Most likely it will sit until it becomes so stale it just doesn’t matter any longer and I delete the damned thing and feel tons of guilt. The last thing that happens is that it gets accidentally deleted in one of my bulk clearing operations.

See, for better or worse, my email inbox is my primary collection point. Oh, yeah, we’re talking GTD methodology here. My three or for personal email addresses and the auto-redirect from work all dump in to this bin. Now that I do CM at work I get 20 – 50 automated build status emails per day. My team also has a habit of CC’ing the team list whenever we work through a problem. On the one hand this helps with communication and gets more eyeballs on the problem quickly. On the other it generates tons of email churn when you’re not immediately involved in a particular problem.

But I digress. The point being that I sift several hundred email messages a day which, for most of you, is probably no big deal. Let’s just say I’m not the world’s best multi-tasker. So what happens is the inbox fills up with gibberish and eventually I go on a wholesale delete binge. I don’t want this to take all day so it involves some mental triage whereby I estimate the necessity of keeping a message around by looking at the subject, sender, date and what I can dredge up from memory. Needless to say, it is an entirely fallible system.

Add to this mix the tendency of my ISP to choke in mid-fetch and then do a complete dump of everything in mbox the next time my client goes after mail. Nothing like getting your last week’s worth of mail a couple times every day. Each time this happens the messages that require action have to run the triage gauntlet.

All of this to say that I know the solution to the problem. A basic tenet of GTD is process your collection points and move the stuff requiring action into an appropriate bin/list/what-have-you. Leaving your action items to mingle with your inbox keeps you from being able to trust your system and if you can’t trust it, the principle benefit of not having to remember everything on your plate at all times goes out the window.

So I made a point today of getting my GTD tool in order (yay OmniFocus!) and have managed to keep my inbox empty-ish for most of the day. OmniFocus is no longer stale. iCal is up to day and is an accurate reference tool again. In short, life is much better this way. I know in my heart and head that GTD works. It’s just my lizard brain that gets lazy and causes the system to break down.

So we’re not big on lizards any more…