After reading in several blogs about David Allen and his book/process Getting Things Done, I decided to give it a try.  The set-up has been significant, and I'm not done by any stretch, but I've finished my inbox, and for the first time since the day I started at Microsoft, my inbox is empty!

Jeff Sandquist has been a wonderful source of information on the process, as well as encouragement.  The inbox took me right about 3.5 hours of focused effort, going from around 430 emails (all already thread compressed) to zero.  Boy does zero feel good... WOO HOO!

If you are thinking of using this process, here are a couple of my implementation notes:

• The Outlook Add-in totally rocks (although of course I do have a few suggestions for improvements ;-)
• Many things that I think should take two minutes, actually take 5-10 (hmm, maybe that's why I have a hard time making it home when I say I'll be home?)
• I've discovered that I'm a very bad judge of just how long two minutes is (tonight on the way home I'm going to buy a timer to help train myself)
• When I create a task for an email that is going to take more than two minutes to deal with, I wish I would have started from the very beginning prepending “Review/Respond“ to the begining of the task name, as well as including in the task which folder I filed the email
• Allowing enough focused time for collection and processing is critical
• And lastly, Remember to bring your lunch if you're going to spend Sunday in the office