Inbox Zero — Day 5. Beyond Email
As we already mentioned in our first article, Inbox Zero is not about a fanatic race to reach an empty email inbox.
Inbox Zero is about spending your time more efficiently, about making sure that you focus on the important things and filter out the noise, about having to look at things only when you have to, about setting your own schedule instead of letting it being dictated by others. It’s about peace of mind.
In fact, Inbox Zero goes way beyond just email. It applies to all things that we need to keep track off in our work, not just the things that we (by chance) received by email.
That’s the reason why Tasks in a Box is not just limited to tracking emails, but offers the possibility to organize and track all of your work.
Focus list
At the heart of Tasks in a Box, there is the focus list. The focus list shows you all your tasks and emails that you need to focus on right now. Tasks appear on the focus list based on the due date that have been set. You can find the focus list in the Tasks in a Box Outlook add-in (select focus in the bottom navigation) as well as in the Tasks in a Box web and desktop application.
The focus list not only shows you manually created tasks, but includes your tracked and snoozed emails as well. This way, you have a complete overview of your day.
Prioritize your work
When a new action comes up (e.g., you’ve got a call from a customer with a question, an action was put forward during a meeting, or an idea about a new marketing campaign popped into your head), you can do one of the following things. Note that this is very similar to the approach we described for emails in your inbox in our 2nd article.
Just do it
If the action takes less than 2 minutes of your time to get done (e.g., a question to schedule a meeting), just do it right away. Don’t bother writing it down. It would be much less efficient to create a task, schedule it and take it up again later on.
Schedule it
If the action takes some more time or it is something that you can’t do right away, note it down as a task and schedule it by setting a due date. Your task will be out of your sight and will appear back on your focus list at the selected date.
Optionally organize your task into projects. E.g., you can setup a project for each of your clients, or create a project for all tasks related to your weekly team meetings. Use tags to help you classify your tasks. E.g., use a tag #call to indicate that the task is about making a phone call.
Archive it
If the action is not something that you are planning to do in the near future, create a task and move it to a backlog project. Do not set a due date. E.g., an idea about a possible new marketing campaign might be something that you want to do in the future (but you don’t know if and when). A marketing backlog project where you keep track of all marketing ideas is a good way to build up an organized backlog.
Delegate it
If the action should be taken care of by someone else (e.g., a colleague in your team), create a task and delegate it. Use the task description to make the purpose of the task clear for your colleague and set a due date when you expect the task to be completed.
You and your colleague(s) can use task comments to ask questions and to keep everyone up to date about the progress of the task.
Track anything
Tasks in a Box helps you to track anything. Whether it concerns emails you need to follow up, a backlog of product & marketing ideas, meeting minutes, job candidate tracking, or following up on your employee’s goals and objectives.
Custom fields allow you to extend tasks so that you can keep track of all useful information. There are a lot of scenarios where you might want to use custom fields on your tasks. Here are a few examples:
- Add custom fields to keep track of estimated and actual hours on your tasks. This way everyone has a clear overview of the time that was estimated and the time already spent for each of your tasks.
- When you setup a project to keep track of all reported bugs for your products, you can add a priority field to indicate the most important issues, add a choice field to keep track of the product the bug relates to, or even add a number field to keep track of the number of times the issue was reported.
- Setup a project to manage all the actions that are coming out of your weekly team meetings. Add a date field to your tasks so that you can keep track of the exact meeting date that a particular action was raised.
- Create a project to track all candidates in your hiring pipeline from application to hire. Create a task for each candidate that is applying. Use custom fields to add more information to your tasks: what is the position the candidate is applying for? for which team? which interviews have taken place?
