Tessa Lau wrote a comment to my posting on the joys of an empty inbox, asking whether Gmail and Getting Things Done might not be incompatible, since Gmail discourages filing, while GTD discourages leaving things in one’s inbox (physical, computer, or metaphorical).

I don’t think they’re incompatible. I archive things in GMail to get them out of my inbox (and therefore, out of my face) unless I expect to deal with them almost immediately. The only filing I do in GMail is to automatically move some mailing lists into their own folders, never letting them into the inbox at all — and to be honest, I’m not sure that’s really a good idea for most of them, because then I’m tempted to let them sit. For everything else, I rely on search.

That’s actually fairly similar to the way I work in Lotus Notes, too; I have a few folders I use for active projects or obviously-related things (all of my electronic paystubs get filed in their own folder, for example), but most of my stuff gets “filed” in “Miscellaneous” (which could just as well be named “not the inbox”) and I rely on search to find anything I need. Keeping my Notes inbox empty is a harder task than my GMail inbox; I haven’t looked at it since I left for vacation nearly two weeks ago, and I dread what I’ll find when I do look.

Fry’s had a couple of DVDs that we wanted in their “one day sale” ad in today’s Murky Nooz: Serenity and Battlestar Galactica Season 2.0. (“We” is defined as “at least Jeff”, by the way.) But, after my recent experience, I didn’t want to go to Fry’s if I could possibly avoid it (by the way, I still haven’t gotten a response to the letter I sent Randy Fry).

Instead, I went to Circuit City to test their price matching policy.

The first cashier I dealt with was at a temporary register, and he said he couldn’t do a price match, but he sent me to one of his colleagues at a permanent register. He couldn’t help me either, and sent me to the returns/exchanges/customer service line. We were first in line. It still took several minutes for someone to help us, and I had to show him the price on both items in the Fry’s ad, but there was no problem in meeting it — in fact, he didn’t even bother to phone Fry’s to make sure they still had the DVDs in stock.

But then I threw a wrench into the proceedings; there was a coupon on the DVDs, good for $10 if you bought both Serenity and BSG 2.0 together. He wasn’t sure if he could honor the coupon and do a price match, so he vanished into the back room for a few minutes. Then he came out and rang up the lowered price (in fact, now that I think of it, he saved us an extra 8 cents by reducing the price of BSG by $10 instead of entering a $10 coupon).

I can’t call this a “no-hassle” experience, but it was enormously easier than getting a price match at Fry’s was. I intend to continue to avoid Fry’s whenever I expect to be able to pick up the same merchandise elsewhere.