11.3 Tasks, flags and following things up

What you'll be able to do

Get every commitment out of your head and into a system that reminds you, including the ones other people owe you. A fifteen-minute weekly review closes the loop and keeps the whole thing honest.

Before you start

Your live mailbox again, and To Do, which is the task list joined to Outlook. Flagged mail appears there by itself.

The work

1. Same either way: the principle comes before the features. A commitment you remember only in your head is one that will wake you at two in the morning. Every "I'll send that by Friday" goes into the system at the moment you say it. That is the defer verb from the sorting lesson, now with its full machinery.
2. Same either way: flag the mail that carries a commitment. Select the message and press Insert, and it joins the flagged list in To Do, so the mail and the task are one item. Press Insert again on a flagged item to mark it done. This is the two-second capture for anything that arrives by mail.
3. Same either way: give real deadlines a date. A flag says "pending", while a task with a due date says "Friday" and reminds you. In To Do, add the date to the flagged item. You can also create tasks there with Ctrl+N for commitments that were never emails, such as renewing a licence or submitting a form. The My Day list each morning is where dated tasks appear.
4. Same either way: here is the habit almost nobody keeps, and it is what separates the reliable from the rest. Keep a waiting-on list: the commitments where somebody owes you. The vendor promised the quote by Tuesday. You sent the draft and are waiting for the review. Flag your own sent message, or add a task named "Waiting: …", and then chasing no longer depends on your memory of other people's promises. Half of being reliable at work is remembering what you are owed.
5. Same either way: close the loop with the weekly review. Fifteen minutes, in the same slot every week, booked as a recurring appointment as the calendar lesson taught. Walk the flagged list and either complete or re-date each item. Walk the task list and ask whether every due date is still true. Walk the waiting-on list and chase what is overdue with a two-line mail. Then sweep whatever is still sitting in the inbox into flags or tasks. The review is what makes the system trustworthy, because a list you never look at again is only a record of good intentions. And the trust is the whole point: your head lets go only of what it believes the system is holding.

Try it

Flag three real commitment emails, and put dates on the two that have deadlines. Create two tasks for promises that never had an email. Start a waiting-on entry for something somebody owes you now. Book the recurring fifteen-minute review, and run the first one at the end of this study session.

Check yourself