Review

Mark Hurst is an entrepreneur and consultant on human-factors issues in the digital world. He offers up a plan for dealing with the deluge of digital information, especially email. His main idea: keep your email folders empty, and use a specific type of to-do list. Amazingly, the to-do list should have exactly the features offered by his gootodo.com product.

I would recommend this book to anyone whose email inbox is overflowing. He’s absolutely right that it is liberating to reduce the inbox (and all other email folders) to empty. And by doing so you are able to concentrate on the work at hand.

His design of a to-do list also seems right on target. The basic idea is that to-do items should always have a date. They should not appear on the list until that date, thus allowing you to focus on today’s items today. The gootodo.com product provides this feature, along with the ability to email tasks into the future. This allows you to add to your to-do list anytime and anywhere.

He also offers advice on file management, such as file organization and naming. This was useful, perhaps, but the real value of the book is in his treatment of email and task management.

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