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Sorry for the lack of posts lately – a com­bi­na­tion of a quick jaunt to Corn­wall (to con­duct a thor­ough sur­vey of beaches in the pour­ing rain), pitch­ing for some rather lovely new clients (you know who you are – wel­come aboard) and an ongo­ing moun­tain of work.

In com­mon with many oth­ers, my first morn­ing back was spent delet­ing emails. It’s not like it was all spam – our spam pro­tec­tion is pretty good. It was just stuff for the most part – although stuff with a cou­ple of ‘must read’ mails hid­den in the mid­dle some­where. Deal­ing effec­tively with email (and stuff in gen­eral) is quickly becom­ing a must-have skill (and sadly not one I seem to possess).

There are a vari­ety of sys­tems around. The one that gen­er­ates near fanat­i­cal devo­tion is the whole Get­ting Things Done (GTD) move­ment based on the book of the same name by David Allen. It has spawned a mul­ti­tude of web­sites and soft­ware tools to sup­port the sys­tem (a quick search for GTD on Google nets over 29 mil­lion pages).

Fore­most among these is 43 Fold­ers which, together with the excel­lent Life­hacker, offers tip, tricks and tech­niques for doing stuff faster, bet­ter and with less stress.

43 Fold­ers is writ­ten Mer­lin Mann who recently gave a talk at Google on deal­ing with email – a sys­tem called Email Zero. As with all the best things, is really sim­ple com­mon sense. Take a look (it’s just under an hour but the sys­tem itself is dealt with in the first 25 mins or so).

Now, admit­tedly, I haven’t man­aged to get to Email Zero yet but last night I did man­age to get to Email Four which for me is some­thing close on miraculous.

BTW there’s a nice post on 43 Fold­ers about how Mer­lin has improved his pre­sen­ta­tions. Read it here.

Source: Pre­sen­ta­tion Zen

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