My only goal tomorrow
October 18, 2009 – 12:33 am…is to get through my inbox backlog. All of it. I don’t care if I get nothing else done; I’m catching up on email.
The bar has been set. There are 621 threads (not emails, threads) I have to go through; since that’s over 10 hours if I go through one email per minute, I’m going to have to adopt a different strategy. I’m going to try Inbox Xeno On Steroids: work through my inbox backlog in sprint of no more than one hour in length, and every sprint must deal with at least half the threads. Thus after 1 sprint I should have no more than 310 threads to go through; after 2 sprints, 155, then 77, then 38, then 19, then 9, then… well, if I can’t deal with an email in 15 minutes, I’ve got bigger problems than an overloaded inbox.
The key word here is ruthless. That is the adjective I will be applying to the verbs “delete” and “archive” en masse during the course of this adventure. PERFECTIONISM WILL DIE. Or rather, since my perfectionism seems to be stubbornly baked in, I can whale down on it as hard as possible and still be pretty sure it isn’t going to break/snap/go-away; turning it on will always be an option, so I’m going to practice turning it off. A lot.
One Response to “My only goal tomorrow”
Every month, I look at all the lists I am subscribed to and I say “do I read most of these emails, or do I let these emails pile up and then do a mass mark-as-read or just scan a few subject lines?”
I am pretty ruthless about this. It’s the only way to keep email manageable. Nothing is more demotivating than waking up 6 hours after you’ve gone to bed and seeing 200 new emails, even if you never look at most of them.
If something is REALLY IMPORTANT, it eventually gets forwarded to me directly from whatever list it originated on.
By Max on Oct 20, 2009