Bit Literacy - Mark Hurst [11]
Todos: Use the “two-minute rule” for todos: if it takes two minutes or less to complete, do it immediately, even if it means physically getting up from your chair and temporarily leaving the bit world. Once it’s complete, delete the e-mail. On the other hand, if the todo requires more than two minutes of your time, forward it to your todo list—which must exist separate from the inbox—and then delete it. (See the next chapter for managing todos.)
In each case above, note the common fate of the e-mail: it must leave the inbox. Delete it, or file it elsewhere, but never allow an e-mail to remain in the inbox. The inbox is only a temporary holding place for incoming e-mail—for no longer than twenty-four hours—and never for long-term storage.
Following the method described above actually doesn’t take much time—probably less time, in fact, than it took to read the chapter to this point. With practice, an inbox cleanout should take no more than a few minutes. The key is to apply it consistently, like flossing daily, so that it becomes second nature. E-mail overload, that chronic source of stress, is thus almost a trivial problem to solve. Cleaning the inbox doesn’t mean doing all the work described in the messages; it just means moving the messages to their proper places. Only then, with an empty inbox, can you focus on the actual work to be done.
Induction
Before getting to the steady-state method, many users need to first go through induction, the one-time removal of long-standing overload. Induction takes an inbox full of e-mail from the past several days, weeks, months, or years, and gets the message count to zero—not near it, but exactly zero—in one massive cleanout. It’s useful not just for first-timers in bit literacy, but also for experienced users at moments when the inbox is unnaturally full of messages—when returning from a long vacation, for example.
Although it may be intimidating to users with months or years of old messages sitting in the inbox, induction is the only solution that gets users on track for daily emptying. A more gradual approach may seem more attractive—“I’ll just clean it out a little bit each day, and soon it will be empty”—but it probably won’t succeed. Pledges of gradual reform, however earnest, won’t work for users who have grown accustomed to a high message count. They need to see a zero count.
The good news is that induction is well within the reach of any user. Like the steady-state method, induction doesn’t ask users to do all the work in the inbox; it only asks that they move the messages to where they belong—the todo list, calendar, and so on. An inbox with hundreds of messages can be cleaned out in this way in an hour or two of focused work. Thereafter, the inbox can be cleaned out daily in a few minutes.
The three steps in induction are similar to the steady-state method. Steps 1 and 2 are the same as above: read and delete all personal e-mails, and then delete all the spam.
Step 3 of induction starts by deleting newsletters and FYIs in bulk:
Sort the inbox by Subject and look for newsletters with several issues. These will appear together in the sorted inbox. Delete them all immediately, without reading them; this is no time to slow down and read what happened days, weeks, or months ago. If you’re tempted to start opening them now, remind yourself that you survived this long without reading them. Delete them all and move on.
To find FYIs and CCs, sort by From and Subject to see if there are any messages that you can delete without opening. Is there an announcement of a meeting that you already attended? Delete it. Is there a long series of e-mails on the same conversation thread that you can ignore? Delete them all.
Now sort by date, with the oldest message on top, and start opening the messages in order, one by one, to engage each. At this point the process is the same as the steady-state method, except with extreme bias toward speed. Be merciless in marching through these e-mails as quickly as possible—there’s a long way to go before you reach the goal