hsgtd and friends 1: mutt inbox and actions

I've been practising the methodology of Getting Things Done for over 4 years now, but I'm still not very good at it.

I hope to write a small serious of postings showing my current GTD state of the art. I hope it will be useful to somebody out there and that I will get some ideas on fine-tuning my approach.

Another hope I have is to reach out to technical people who are resisting "becoming more organised" because of the apparent overhead involved. I hope to demonstrate that you can actually get a lot of mileage out of a handful of shell scripts and simple practices (keeping all your mail in a single folder).

Ingredients

• mutt - The appeal here is to have a mail client that is malleable and which can talk to 3rd-party software. So it doesn't necessarily have to be as old school as mutt, just scriptable and capable of playing with others.
• hsgtd - a command line GTD tracker written in 351 lines of Haskell. Everything is stored in a simple text file

I also use mairix, xmonad and Unison, but these will likely only be relevant in future postings.

Background

In this first instalment, I would like to talk about how I deal with inbox triage. It's useful to know a little bit of GTD terminology for this.

• Inbox - things which are not yet triaged. Practicing GTD is like using an issue tracker; you decouple triage from actions. One priority in GTD is to empty out the inbox by performing triage on all items. Working this way is efficient because you avoid looking at the same item or having the same thought about it (gee, I oughta...) twice. Things go in stages.
  
• Next actions - One of the results from the triage process is a set of "next actions", concrete physical actions like, eg. call Bob 398-0811 to see if he wants that spare external disk drive
  

I use two different programs: mutt to view my inbox, and hsgtd to view my list of next actions. In this series of posts, I'll be exploring how mutt and hsgtd might talk to each other.

Inbox triage : from email to next actions

The most common source of next actions for me is my email, so it is very important for me to good integration between my hsgtd list and my email. In particular, one thing I like to be able to do is to read an email, figure out what "next action" to do with it, record that next action, and pin that email to the next action for reference.

To this end, I have a simple shell script and muttrc macro that you can copy from the hsgtd contrib directory. The shell script greps an email from stdin for its message id and reads the command line parameters for the next action text. It combines the two by adding an hsgtd action using the message ID as a project name. Here's the script to show you how simple and stupid it is:

#!/bin/bash
MSGID=$(grep -i '^message-id' | head -n 1 | sed 's/Message-I[Dd]: /:/')
hsgtd add "$@" "$MSGID"

To make this work with mutt, I also have a small macro that lets me call the shell script whenever I'm viewing a message:

macro pager \Ca "|email-add-action"
macro index \Ca "|email-add-action"

Triage example

So how does this get used in practice? Let's say my inbox has a patch to Darcs from Guillaume.

If you saw Merlin Mann's Inbox Zero talk, there are 5 "verbs" you can apply to an inbox item. Let's run through these. Clearly this is not a mail I want to [i] delete, and for a variety of reasons, it's not something I want to [ii] delegate, or to [iii] defer. Let's look at the email in mutt:
I can't [iv] respond yet because I need take some time out to review the patch so I need [v] track an action for this to do later. I hit Control-a in mutt, and type in "@darcs review this". This creates an action in hsgtd. If I later visit hsgtd and type "list" to see the actions available, I will see the email from Guillaume:

By the way, if you're wondering about the "@darcs", the use of an at-sign before a word is an hsgtd convention for contexts. Contexts are a useful way of dividing up actions because they signify certain constraints on where you can perform the actions (typical contexts might be @home, @work). I use @darcs because working on darcs is sometimes something I'll do in one block at a time. If I type "list @darcs" in hsgtd, it will show me only the actions for that context:

Back to main story. We've now added Guillaume's message to hsgtd. Let's take a closer look at the entry that was created. You see the original action text that we typed in "@darcs review this". Notice how the context @darcs was helpfully highlighted in yellow. In green you will also see a strange suffix like ":<4ba5fc74.0e0db80a.261d.ffff8b51@mx.google.com>". This is useful for three reasons:

1. It creates a GTD "project" for that email. Sometimes dealing with an email requires more than one action. In the GTD world, any set of >1 action is considered a project.
   
2. [most important] It gives you a means for retrieving the email that goes with this action when you are actually predisposed to do that action.
3. It allows you to be fairly oblique in your next action texts, you can type in any short string which seems to be meaningful without having to be super-precise about it.

Next up: waiting and review

In this posting, we saw a way of extracting "next actions" from your mutt inbox and storing them in an hsgtd list. In a future posting, I hope to expand on this by exploring delegation (asking somebody else to act) and review (going over your actions and delegated items). Actually, the review was what initially motivated this blog posting. I'd finally worked out how to create a virtual mailbox of my hsgtd-tracked items and wanted to show it off. But that will have to wait as this post is long enough as it is.