As I started learning about GTD and wandered around the internet looking for tips and tricks, I inevitably came across Merlin Mann. One of Merlin’s claims to fame is Inbox Zero. If you’re not familiar with it, you can read the original articles here and watch the famous 2007 Google talk here.

One aspect of this technique or mentality is to always process your email to empty whenever you look at it. This is pretty shocking for most people, and I’ll probably come back to this part of it in a later post. Today, however, I’d like to focus on the other part of Inbox Zero, which involves checking your email only a few times a day. This may seem crazy, but as Merlin points out, the constant interruptions from new email messages are down right catastrophic for your productivity. If you want to be more efficient with your work, you need to change your attitude towards email.

In a recent episode of the MacBreak Weekly podcast, Merlin mentioned an exciting new service called Syphir, which adds a new level of control to your email. This was the last piece of the puzzle for getting my email under control.

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Today, I listened to a great episode of the David Allen Company podcast (opens in iTunes) called “Best Practices of Doing”. In it, David and two other GTD (Getting Things Done) coaches discussed some ways to actually do the things on your todo lists. One thing that came up was how to decide what task to actually work on from your task list.

When most people make a todo list, they feel the need to prioritize their tasks. Even since adopting GTD, I still get the urge sometimes to arrange my lists by order of importance. This is the wrong approach, however, because you can accomplish much more by thinking in terms of contexts instead. In GTD, contexts are the people, locations and tools needed to accomplish a task (e.g., a phone, your boss or at your desk). Grouping your tasks by context allows you to focus only on the tasks you can accomplish with the resources you have available. With this system, there is no place for prioritization of tasks. You simply have a list of actions for each specific context.

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