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For many of us, email is ubiquitous. We begin the (work)day at the same place and in very much the same way as we finish it: in our Inbox, checking, reading, answering and deleting messages. These activities regularly stay with us throughout the day.

Ubiquitous and Annoying: Email

This ubiquity of email is, as it turns out, a required attribute of a useful to do list. You can keep a gorgeous to do list in a dedicated program or on the Web. You can even print it out or create it with paper and pencil in the first place. If it is unobtrusive, it is worthless.

Email is very obtrusive and it is extremely annoying. The annoying email messages are often from bosses, coworkers, friends or family, and they are often about things they want us to do.

Out of Date and Difficult to Maintain: a To Do List

If you want to maintain a working (sic!) to do list, you first item on this list must always be to maintain it. This means copying the necessary information from the email message to the to do list, doing what is required, and eventually removing the item from the to do list.

How much easier is life for her who uses her email client as a to do list. Your email client's Inbox can be a to do list that practically maintains itself and most likely will not get out of date.

Even with email, there are unobtrusive places where you hardly ever pass by, though. As we have seen, these spots are not the best for items that are pending to be done. If you file (or filter) a message to a folder the moment you receive it chances are you will not see it again.

Self-Administrating and Efficient: an Email To Do List

To make a to do message which has already been moved to its final destination within your folder hierarchy sticky you can keep it open. If you have a computer with lots of memory and a large monitor running at a high resolution this can be a very practical way of keeping track of the messages that still need attention. But you may end up with lots of open windows, which can be confusing.

A different approach to using your email client as a to do list is less confusing. If you maintain a special folder containing all to do messages you need to keep open only this folder.

You can take "special folder" literally and create a folder (maybe called "To Do") whereyou put all messages that need work. You would manually move to do messages to that folder and put them back to their final destination when they are done.

The special to do items folder can also be your Inbox, which is the "default" folder anyway and thus gets most attention. To use your Inbox as the to do list you would not filter any messages automatically (except maybe those which are very unlikely to become to do list items; mailing list messages would be an example for such messages). Instead, you would allow them to remember you of the things you have to do and only manually move them (maybe with the help of a filter) to their final destination in your folder hierarchy.

So your inbox turns into a self-administrating to do list.

"The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."

Edmund Burke