Flag and forget

I scrolled down my email earlier, spotting the items I had flagged for follow up. This is the way I usually work in Outlook, highlighting emails with a flag which turns the text red and bold, designed to catch my eye.

Of course, as more emails come in, they scroll off the screen and get forgotten.

You can have a little sidebar of them, as they are automatically converted to Outlook tasks, but I often ignore them too. The text is too small and I have to open each one to see what they are and what I am supposed to do with them.

In one of the flagged emails, I found a copy of a purchase order from last week, where I needed to print, sign and scan a PDF order and email it off to the relevant team. However, I had forgotten to do this, again.

Who knows what other horrors lurk in my inbox that have been left un-complete.

I decided I needed to go old school and found one of my old notebooks, a sexy black Evernote styled Moleskine and wrote a few tasks down I needed to complete today in scribbled pencil. I think I am already ahead of the evolution curve where humans convert from writing by hand to keyboard. I can’t write neatly any more. Squashed grey spiders danced along the page in what looked like Tolkien’s first attempt at Elvish.

I got the tasks done, ticked them off my list and carried on with my day.

Did it feel good, was there a dopamine rush as I did them? No.

I just felt useless for not doing them last week when I should have.

PING!

Another email came in and I flagged it to look at tomorrow. It’s only a quick task but I was trying not to be dragged away from what I was doing at the time.

No doubt by 10 AM tomorrow it will have scrolled off the screen again and it’s too small a task to be worth writing in my notebook.

Managing and working from a to-do list is only as good as the list, which is only as good as the person who makes it. I am not sure I am dedicated enough to maintain one. That is why I failed at adopting the Bullet Journal method, you need to go all in or not at all.

Maybe I need to set up Outlook to set a date to follow up each item as I flag them, so I get reminded of them in 24 hours time?

I wish I was more dedicated to getting things done.