I know, I know - I’ve said before that, in order to get things done, “Just Do It!” is a valid approach.
But that only works for things that are truly interesting. If I’m faced with more mundane tasks, like working through my e-mail inbox, every e-mail seems like yet another obstacle that will take way too much time. And no matter of cheerleading will make dealing with it any more interesting.
So yesterday, faced with a 100+ mails in my inbox, I set out to find out why it’s so hard to deal with them. For each e-mail, I intended to jot down a short summary, what I should do with it, and why it was so hard to decide.
What happened then was rather interesting. Instead of writing down the reasons why I couldn’t do things, I just did them. It turned out that that, in most cases, was easier than just writing up an excuse. (Plus, I knew I was writing about this - and I really didn’t want to post a bunch of lame excuses to my blog)
I’ll share a couple of the more interesting ones - and what I learned from them:
Somebody sent me a link to a “really cool piece of music”. And the speakers on my laptop are broken, so I’d have to find head phones, sit down for a couple of minutes, etc. In other words, I didn’t really want to, but felt it was the polite thing to do. DELETE
Lesson learned: If it’s not helping you achieve your goals, mercilessly wipe it out. There are too many demands on your time as-is - don’t spend time on things you don’t truly care about.
Several comments on my blog languished un-answered. REPLY
Lesson learned: If you do care about it - and I certainly care about you guys! - it’s better to actually act on it. Letting it sit in a filing folder really doesn’t help.
An e-mail from DynDNS. I only kept it around to remind myself that of the many dynamic DNS providers I evaluated, I chose them. FILE (as bookmark)
Lesson learned: Your inbox is not a filing cabinet. The more you clutter it, the more you dread going through it. Also, I had the interesting insight that it might be a good idea to file web links as bookmarks. I know, it’s obvious - but I didn’t quite realize it till yesterday. So, lesson #2: Have appropriate ways to file things.
Correspondence regarding the Watchdog web site. Properly processing it would mean finishing a couple of rather longish tasks. So instead, I break them down into smaller tasks and add them to my project list. FILE
Lesson learned: If it’s a to-do item and takes more than a few minutes, put it on your to-do list. You won’t finish it while cleaning out mail.
I’m terrible for using my e-mail inbox as a temporary “to-do” inbox. If I had a keyboard shortcut that created to-dos in Things from e-mails, and filed the e-mails away, I reckon this problem would be solved. Maybe I just need to be more diligent about doing it manually.
I haven’t tried it, but I suspect Mail Act-On is what you’re looking for…
http://www.indev.ca/MailActOn.html