Adrian Trenholm Tickling email in Outlook

Adrian Trenholm
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Tickling email in Outlook
May 22nd, 2005
One of the best things aboutDavid Allen’sGetting Things Done method is the “Tickle” file: a file numbered 1 to 31, in which you place material that you don’t want to deal with right now, but want to be reminded about later. Every day, you simply check the Tickle file to see what reminders you have placed there. So, today is 22 May, I check 22 in my Tickle file and add whatever I find there back into my inbox for today.
Great, but how do you tickle email, specifically in Outlook? I wanted to take email which I didn’t want to deal with straight away, remove it from my inbox, then have it automatically reappear in my inbox when I was ready to work on it. Having read Merlin Mann’semail diet, I hit on the idea of flagging the email, but leaving it in the inbox. Of course, David Allen suggests that you operate from an empty inbox, so I use Outlook’s grouping, sorting and filtering to make my inbox appear empty, even while it holds flagged items.
To use this system, first set up your views. I use two views of my inbox, both of which contain the following columns:
Due By Follow Up Flag From Subject Received
To set up the new views, click View > Current View > Define Views… . Create (or copy and adapt) two new views, containing the fields I have listed. Name your new views “Inbox” and “Tickle.” You may also want to tick the box that says “Only show views created for this folder.”
Next you need to apply these settings to your new Inbox view:
Group by: none Sort: Follow Up Flag (ascending) Filter: Click the Advanced tab, then add two rules, as follows Field: Due By
Condition: does not exist Field: Due By
Condition on or before
Value today
Other Settings: Allow in-cell editing (the first check box in the Rows grouping)
And for the Tickle view
Group by: Due By (ascending) Sort: Received (descending) Filter: Off Other Settings: Allow in-cell editing
All incoming mail is visible in both views, but you spend most of your time in your Inbox view. To tickle mail from within the Inbox view, place the cursor in the Due By box and set a future date (tip: use the keyboard. Outlook accepts “tomorrow” or even shorthand like “2d” for “in two day’s time” or “1w” for “in one week’s time”). Don’t hit Return just yet. Instead, hit tab and enter a next action under Follow Up Flag, then hit Return. Alternatively, in the email itself, you could have pressed Ctrl+Shft+G, then entered your reminder and tickle date.
Immediately, the flagged email “disappears,” filtered out of the Inbox view, until its due date, when it will “reappear” in the Inbox view as if it was a new mail. All your tickled mails remain in the Inbox file and you can see them all if you need them, grouped by their due dates in the Tickle view of your Inbox.
In action it looks like this. Let’s say on the 22nd, you get an email inviting you to a meeting, but you can’t confirm your availability until next week. So you tickle the email: “1w” (Tab) “accept or reject meeting invite” (Return). The email disappears from your Inbox view and you carry on processing your incoming mail. On the 29th, the invitation email reappears in your Inbox, with that reminder to accept or reject the invite. By now you know that you can attend, so you reply to confirm and put the meeting in your diary. You can then drag the email into your archive file, or if you want to be reminded about the meeting again at a later date, you can retickle the email with a new flag.
I don’t know if this works with theDavid Allen GTD Add-In for Outlook, but I see no reason why it should not.
Give it a whirl and let me know, in the comments, if it works for you.
This post was inspired byMax talking about David Allen’sWorkflow Processing Using Outlook pdf withJohnnie,Freddie and me over drinks on Friday. Thanks Max.
Update: David Allen is asking all bloggers who write about Getting Things Done to link to thispage explaining GTD.
Entry Filed under:Getting Things Done
42 CommentsAdd your own
1.Rosa Say  |  May 22nd, 2005 at 6:07 pm
Great timing on this post Adrian, for I’ve just finished reading GTD and spent a large part of my day yesterday reconfiguring my calendar and taskpad in Outlook - my email was next!
Mahalo nui for sharing this, (and thank you for the mention in the next post too
Rosa
2.Adrian  |  May 22nd, 2005 at 7:28 pm
Thanks, Rosa.
I know that you are a GMail user, so you may want also to look at thisGTD with GMail whitepaper.Bren recommends it.
3.Rosa Say  |  May 22nd, 2005 at 8:03 pm
Mahalo Adrian, for I really have a lot to sort out on this.
I’m using both Gmail and Outlook for my email (believe it or not, I have 9 different email addresses when you include my domain email too). I love Gmail and Outlook for different reasons, and I haven’t been happy with the results when I tried to import Gmail into my Outlook.
GTD does help by giving me a fresh perspective on the whole thing: he really makes some exceptional points in his book when explaining the why of his theory.
My aloha to you,
Rosa
4.5Russells.net Tickling em&hellip  |  May 23rd, 2005 at 5:35 pm
Tickling email in Outlook Filed under: Computers
5.David  |  May 24th, 2005 at 5:24 pm
I did this and it worked great…
Until I came to work and the new views suddenly disapeared the next day
grrr… I hate outlook…
6.Adrian  |  May 24th, 2005 at 5:47 pm
Bummer!
I am not an Outlook guru, so cannot say why that happened. Did you set up the views via Define Views? And do you have a drop down with your new views in it somewhere on the toolbar?
I know there are quite a few lurkers round this post from Lifehacker and elsewhere - can any of you guys pitch in and help David?
7.m@  |  May 24th, 2005 at 7:31 pm
anyone figure out how to do this with Thunderbird? I’m sure there’s an easy way, i’m just lazy. (well, plus i’m at work without my Thunderbird).
8.Adrian  |  May 24th, 2005 at 7:46 pm
I don’t think you can. I have Thunderbird installed, but while you can flag a mail, you can’t date the flag. I looked at PocoMail too and that doesn’t run dated flags either.
Maybe someone more familiar with Thunderbird could suggest something?
9.David  |  May 24th, 2005 at 7:57 pm
Adrian, thanks for the comments and the email. I did create them via define views, but I no longer see them in the list. I’m subscribed to this comments feed so any pointers would be welcome!
Thanks,
David
10.EmilyM  |  May 24th, 2005 at 8:04 pm
Thanks–I’ve been doing the “flagged emails sit at the bottom of my inbox” thing for a few years now, and this is a lot cleaner–I’m not sitting here getting frustrated about the items I can’t take care of yet.
I did find that at lot of my other settings (e.g. AutoPreview unread items) got undone by this, and I had to restore them.
More than anything else, though, I was interested to read about these capabilities of Outlook. I had no idea you could do this stuff with it. I’m a Thunderbird fan, too, so if anyone figures it out for TB, please post it! Unitl then I’ll be organized at work and disorganized at home.
11.Adrian  |  May 24th, 2005 at 8:20 pm
AutoPreview Unread Items!? Cool. I didn’t know you could do that. Thanks, Emily.
For anyone who wants to do this, it’s:
View > Current View > Customise Current View > Other Settings > Auto Preview > Preview unread items.
If you are setting up your Inbox and Tickle views, just switch on the Preview Unread at the same time you switch on In-Cell Editing.
12.Chuck Cheeze  |  May 27th, 2005 at 10:46 pm
Brilliant. Also, a quick way to change from Inbox to Tickle view and vice-cersa is to use Tools > Customize > View and drag the Current View selector to the main toolbar…quicker than having to go up into the view menu.
13. Robbe Richman  |  May 30th, 2005 at 4:08 pm
Wow! this is great! thank you so much.
If I futz with the appreance, such as grouping, will it mess up the system?
14.Adrian  |  May 30th, 2005 at 8:42 pm
Chuck, thanks, good tip - I do that already, but I didn’t think to mention it.
Robbie, I don’t know what you have in mind, so the best advice is copy the views, name them Inbox Copy and Tickle Copy, then experiment with your copy views.
If it works, report back here, so everyone can benefit.
15. Patrick  |  May 31st, 2005 at 1:25 pm
Great stuff. I only run into one obstacle yet: If someone sends you a mail with the follow-up flag already set (into the future), you won’t see the message in your Inbox view.
16.Adrian  |  June 1st, 2005 at 7:27 am
Mmmm - that is a problem, Patrick. 3 solutions:
Collect incoming mail in Tickle View - deal with the flagged incomers, then revert to Inbox View to “empty” your inbox
Stay in Inbox View; if your Inbox looks empty, but you still see “unread” in your Outlook bar, Folder bar or Status bar, then you know a flagged message has slipped through and you can look for it in Tickle view.
Set up a rule - if incoming messages are flagged, you could strip the flag or divert it to a second folder - say “Inbox - Sender Flagged”
17.Yegor Kuznetsov  |  June 3rd, 2005 at 4:03 pm
Well, if you have to process a bunch of e-mails related to one event, why “tickle” them? There is free solutuion ot there that helps you instantly organize your event-related feedback.
Whether you want to select the best time for soccer practice, find who’s bringing what to a party, or get your friends’ opinion on the latest movie, RSVME allows you to complete all these tasks straight from Microsoft Outlook. Now you don’t have to send multiple e-mails and then spend valuable time putting results together. All responses appear on one easy-to-read form you can instantly share the Q&A summary with respondents to make sure everybody is on the same page.
Download it for free atwww.rsvme.com and give it a shot!
18.lifehack.org » Blo&hellip  |  June 4th, 2005 at 2:46 pm
[…] for the response it requires and then quickly convert that evaluation into action.” Tickling email in Outlook - Using “Tickle” file system from GTD to handling email in Outlook. Gmail Mouse Ha […]
19. airolg  |  June 22nd, 2005 at 11:06 pm
I love this, however, I have some email rules organized by color and those rules are removed. Is there a way to add that back in?
20.Adrian  |  June 23rd, 2005 at 8:29 am
As you set up your views, after you have set “allow in cell editing” under Other Settings, click “Automatic Formatting” and add your colour rules to the new views.
Adrian
21. airolg  |  June 27th, 2005 at 2:15 pm
That worked!!! Thanks for the tip…loving this.
22.未完成 - Incomplete &r&hellip  |  September 8th, 2005 at 11:10 am
[…] 使用的其他日程表软件上标注提醒。如果你使用的是Outlook，则可以从这篇blog中学习在邮件中设置到期提醒的方法。 除了使用上面的方法来GTD外，下面的?? […]
23.Adrian Trenholm » O&hellip  |  October 6th, 2005 at 7:52 pm
[…] e indispensable. The only thing I miss about the Outlook email interface is the ability to tickle email. In every other respect, NEO is superior. I have joined the referral programme, so I make a few doll […]
24.My Life, My Universe, My &hellip  |  January 13th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
[…] d tool at work. First, there is David’s little booklet. There there is this post on Tickling email in Outlook. I still need to work through this during the weekend. Coming back to GMail: To impr […]
25.独自跳舞 » Blog&hellip  |  February 10th, 2006 at 5:18 pm
[…] Adrian Trenholm » Tickling email in Outlook (tags: blog gtd outlook email wordpress) […]
26.silk and spinach&hellip  |  March 19th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
tickling email in outlook…
being a link to a neat way to get your inbox down to empty…
27. Sam  |  August 28th, 2006 at 10:34 am
I love my Outlook tickler!
It’s just a folder called Tickler, with 31 subfolders numbered 01-31. I have set all the folders to display the total number of items (rather than the number of unread items) in brackets after the folder names, so I can instantly see which folders are non-empty.
Each morning, I open the Tickler folder and pull out today’s items. Pretty close in operation to a paper tickler - and fast, too.
To tickle something, I hit Ctrl-Shift-V in Outlook and type the day I want it to go to (i.e. 07), then hit Enter. Again, very fast.
Ticklers rock.
28. Sam  |  August 28th, 2006 at 10:41 am
PS. Since it’s Outlook, one can also drop non-email files directly into these folders - Word documents, PDFs, JPEGs or anything else you need to be reminded of on a specific date.
PPS. I also have twelve folders for months - forgot to mention those… They’re named “M01 - January” etc., which puts them in the correct sequence and directly below my 01-31 folders.
29.log.itto.be » Blog &hellip  |  September 1st, 2006 at 10:17 pm
[…] Adrian Trenholm » Tickling email in Outlook (tags: gtd eMail toread outlook) […]
30. bryane  |  October 6th, 2006 at 10:25 am
One small suggestion : in the “tickler” view, rather than having no filter, I filter with
field: due by
condition: exists
This hides any email that has not been tickled from the view, which seems to make it much easier to use.
31. Dave  |  November 2nd, 2006 at 6:17 pm
The Group by “Due By” takes care of this. If you collapse the group where “Due By” equals None, you only see those emails with a date in the “Due By” field.
It is really a matter of preference. I prefer to have all my emails in at least one view.
32. Patrick  |  November 17th, 2006 at 2:29 pm
(”urn:schemas:httpmail:reply-by” IS NULL) OR (”urn:schemas:httpmail:reply-by” ‘[Deferred]’))
33. Patrick  |  November 17th, 2006 at 2:53 pm
Sorry, for the last entry. Can be deleted.
Adrian,
great idea. Just one problem: When somebody sends you an e-mail with a due date sometime in the future, this never shows up in the filtered Inbox. Only on the date the sender actually expects a reply or an action done, I would see it the first time. Not good.
I work around that the following way:
For an email I’d like to defer, I set the due date, just as you described and a category named [Deferred] (by the way, this is easy to do with Taglocity).
Now my filtering is: no due date set OR due date today or before OR (some due date set AND categories [Deferred]
(”urn:schemas:httpmail:reply-by” IS NULL) OR
(”urn:schemas:httpmail:reply-by” ‘[Deferred]’))
This works for me. YMMV
Rgds
Patrick
34. Patrick  |  November 17th, 2006 at 2:56 pm
hmm,
the first half of the filter code I added is not showing in my post above. I’ll try again:
(”urn:schemas:httpmail:reply-by” IS NULL) OR
(”urn:schemas:httpmail:reply-by” ‘[Deferred]’))
35. Patrick  |  November 17th, 2006 at 2:57 pm
That’s crazy. I cannot post some filter code???
What’s that?
rgds
Patrick
36.Adrian  |  November 20th, 2006 at 9:15 am
Hi Patrick
Thanks for your comments. I did think about this when you (or was it another Patrick?) raised this back in May - see comments 15 and 16. Of all the possible solutions, I went with:
Set up a rule - if incoming messages are flagged, you could strip the flag or divert it to a second folder - say “Inbox - Sender Flagged.”
This worked well enough until I switched to NEO to view my Outlook mail.
PS Spam Karma and / or WordPress inbuilt anti-spam tools are trapping your code. If you want to, email the code to me, I can write a new post.
37. Pete  |  January 1st, 2007 at 9:47 pm
I have been addicted to this great hack for a long time now. I just switched to a mac and I don’t know how to implement this tickling feature. It is so worth it to have this, I will consider moving to ANY email platform to implement this (e.g. some other client, webmail, etc).
Any ideas?
38. hamad  |  January 6th, 2007 at 7:14 pm
pete - run parallels on your intel mac and install outlook . i use windows and osx and, although i much prefer osx, i use my windows machine mainly for outlook when possible. i am planning to upgrade to an intel mac largely to install parallels with outlook running on windows to connect with my exchange server.
39. Pete  |  January 8th, 2007 at 5:11 am
hamad - It’s been a few days since i settled into osx and the best route that I have found for GTD is entourage. But sadly, I can’t implement this tickling trick.
I haven’t installed parallels yet (been putting it off for when I really need to use Visio) but you really think it’s worth it to run outlook?? Is that a waste of resources just to check email? I am kinda hesitant but boy do I miss the tickling feature.
40. hamad  |  March 2nd, 2007 at 1:56 pm
pete - i agree that parallels may be a bit ‘heavy’ for infrequent use but i think i may have found a better solution that allows you to run outlook without installing windows on an intel mac. check out crossover athttp://www.codeweavers.com/products/cxmac/.
i would be interested to hear if you use it and it works for you. i have to wait for the upcoming v6.1 since it does not currently support RPC over HTTP that my exchange hosting provider uses.
41. Pete  |  March 5th, 2007 at 5:12 am
hamad - I heard about this program - sounds interesting. I need to sync my palm treo 680 and am trying to make this work on my mac now. Without researching it I would suspect that it would not support Palm. Maybe I will look into it - I am having a lot of problems synching everything properly using OS X/Entourage/Missing sync.
pete
42.tickling email in outlook&hellip  |  May 12th, 2007 at 2:59 pm
[…] tickling email in outlook Published May 24th, 2005 GTD In Tickling email in Outlook Adrian Trenholm describes a way to set up your Outlook inbox so that it also behaves as a tickler file: “I wanted to take email which I didn’t want to deal with straight away, remove it from my inbox, then have it automatically reappear in my inbox when I was ready to work on it. … David Allen suggests that you operate from an empty inbox, so I use Outlook’s grouping, sorting and filtering to make my inbox appear empty, even while it holds flagged items.” […]