Get your Gmail inbox under control with the 'Getting Things Done' method

Do you often feel overwhelmed by the flood of emails that you need to manage on a daily basis? Be reassured, you’re not alone.

According to a McKinsey study, the average professional spends 28% of the workday reading and answering emails. Imagine what you could do in your workday if you could decrease this figure by only a few points.

Let’s see how you can apply David Allen’s Getting Things Done method to your inbox to get email under control and free your planning and your mind.

• What's the Getting Things Done method?
• How to apply the GTD workflow to email
• How to set up your ‘GTD’ Gmail inbox
• Your routine to stay ahead of things emails

What is the Getting Things Done method?

The Getting Things Done (GTD) method is a productivity framework created by David Allen. The technique is designed to help people organize their projects and tasks in a way that reduces stress and increases efficiency.

It is based on the following decision tree: for each new item arriving in the “inbox” or “to-do basket”, review it and determine whether it is actionable or not, and what to do with it.

The goal is to put in place a straightforward triage process, to make quick decisions, and to have a clear view of what needs to be done.

The two-minute rule

The two-minute rule is a quick and easy way to stop procrastinating and get things done.

The idea: If you can take care of a task in two minutes or less, then you should do it right away. Delaying it or putting it into a “to-do list” for later will only take you more time and clutter your mind.

So if it takes less than two minutes, do it! If not, delegate it or defer it.

How to apply the GTD workflow to email

“There is no light at the end of the tunnel if you are merely letting things pile up there.” - David Allen, Getting Things Done

Most people use their email inbox for staging still-undecided actionable things and the piles of emails can quickly get out of control, creating stress and more mental charge.

So how to get your inbox empty to free your mind, without necessarily having to do the work now? The solution: apply the GTD workflow to your email inbox!

You’ll need two ‘reminder’ folders to organize emails that require action and follow-up:

• ACTION or TO-DO: for any longer-than-two-minute emails that you need to act on
• WAITING FOR or DELEGATED: for emails you need to keep track of, and to hold reminders for anything that you delegate via email

Then you only have to follow the workflow: When a new email comes in, if it only needs a quick reply, compose a short message and hit send. If it needs to be forwarded to someone else, go ahead and do it. If no action is required, delete it or archive it for future reference.

The goal is to get everything out of your email in-basket (and by extension, out of your mind) by making decisions about what each new email means and organizing it accordingly.

How to set up your ‘GTD’ Gmail inbox

Now let’s see how to configure Gmail to easily follow the GTD method.

#1 Create GTD folders using Gmail labels

Create two new labels for ACTIONS and WAITING FOR from the Settings menu.

I’d also recommend creating a REFERENCE / TO KEEP label, or several ones listed by topics, to centralize all emails that you don’t need to act on but want to keep track of for future reference.

These labels should be visually distinct: you can make them all caps with a prefix punctuation like the @ symbol or numbers, which will sort them to the top of the Label list.

#2 Customize your inbox display

I’ll suggest using Gmail Priority Inbox. It allows you to group the emails in your inbox by the labels we set up. This way, instead of having one continuous stream of unsorted emails, your inbox will be separated into three (or four) distinct sections:

• Unread emails
• @Actions emails
• @WaitingFor emails
• Everything else (emails that still need to be labeled or archived)

#3 First thing first: purge your inbox

You may wonder “I have new labels, that's cool, but what do I do with my existing huge pile of emails?”

If you’ve let emails pile up, purging is the first thing to do. You can label your latest emails with ACTIONS or WAITING FOR, and add everything else to an Archive folder named “GTD Archive March 2023” for instance.

Your routine to stay ahead of things emails

Each day, or twice a day, open Gmail and follow the GTD workflow:

• DELETE what you can (if you are wondering “but what if I need to find it again someday?”, you can use the Gmail ‘Archive' option, instead of 'Delete’)
• FILE what you want to keep but don’t need to act on → move it to the REFERENCE folder
• DO the less-than-2-minute ones
• MOVE into your reminder folders all the things you’re waiting for (WAITING FOR) and all your actionable emails (ACTION)

Once you’ve deleted, filed, finished your < 2-minute ones, and moved others into ACTION or WAITING FOR, congrats! You’re left with an empty in-tray! Now, it will be much easier to evaluate your work at hand, and to focus your time and mind on these actionable items.

Importance of a regular ACTIONS review

A small warning: “out of sight, out of mind” is not really out of mind. You must consistently review actionable emails. I’d advise scheduling a time on your calendar to work on it.

You are now all set to get your emails under control ???