As a fringe member of the cult of Getting Things Done (c. f. David Allen), I keep my inboxes (including my email inbox) nice and clear, shuttling messages into Archive, Action, Respond, Review, and so on. The idea in short is that by doing this context-based sorting you will be more efficient and actually be able to respond to all your email that needs a response. Sounds jiffy, and it is, but the secret battery in this otherwise perfect perpetual motion machine is a weekly three-hour review of what has landed in all those other boxes. Uh huh. If I could find three free hours a week I wouldn’t be in the market for magic organizational schemes.

I do manage to keep my Respond folder pretty short, and Action doesn’t get too out of control, but it’s that box called Review that really piles up bad. By definition it contains things that are too valuable to delete and want my attention, but require neither response nor action. Talk about doomed. I should probably rename it “Pigeonhole” and reduce my cognitive dissonance a bit. As I open it up tonight I see email messages that are over one year old.

Let’s see what we have here. An interesting NPR article forwarded to me by my wife. When I try to link to it I get a 404, which should surprise nobody. Another old link to a survey that my financial advisor would like me to fill out, dated 1/5/07 and with the words “very important” in the subject link. Trying to follow the link produces a web application error. Man, things rot fast on the Internet. I guess that was more of an “action” than a “review” but after all it was just a survey which is why it landed in Review in the first place.

Is Review a better fate than Trash for these hapless missives? Sure. I’m enjoying catching up on the rest of the stuff this particular fishing net has caught. Pictures and news from family and friends, interesting programming techniques or products, human interest stories, financial advice, and the like…all covered in the Internet’s version of a thick layer of dust. Better late than never, I guess.