We use Zendesk for customer support, JIRA for managing tasks in our projects internally and Slack for unstructured internal team communication. I get an email in each of these systems, if an item that I am involved in has changed. Empty Your Inboxįor many areas in our company we have appropriate systems to store open work items. Only then you can really concentrate on the one task you are currently handling. The goal is to store really everything externally in one or only a few places so you can be absolutely sure you will not forget these tasks. It is not helpful if you are permanently thinking of things you should not forget like call customer Smith back, send an offer to the new prospect, buy some rice and coffee on your way home, or call grandma for birthday. To be most productive it is important that your brain can concentrate on the task you are currently working on. I must admit, I have not implemented the whole approach, but there was one advice that changed my way of working: Free your mind and collect everything externally. Finally, the book Getting Things Done by David Allen was the trigger to change my habits. From time to time I tried to catch up with inbox but within days I reached the same mess as before. I had tons of unanswered emails lying around for days or admittedly even weeks and was feeling guilty about it.

Like most people, I have often been struggling with my email inbox.

Todoist outlook add in not working