Clint Hamada's List: PD/InboxZero

• Like learning to save money or driving a stick, the earlier you start slavishly guarding your time, the easier the habit becomes
• Accept that your workload exceeds your resources -- that you are the first and last filter for what deserves your time -- and you'll already be better off than you were even two minutes ago.
• You need an agnostic system for dealing with mail that isn't based on nonces, exceptions, and guilt. Truthfully, once you get really fast and ruthless at processing the crap and benching the runners-up, you'll actually have vastly more time to write the long personal emails you enjoy.
• Everyone I know (including me) is overwhelmed with email and unsure of how to make it better in a given day. Beating yourself up about it is the worst thing you can do
• honesty about true priorities, realistic time expectations, and a baseline gutcheck on what you really intend to do about any given message.
• Since email is the primary touchpoint for most of our business and personal communication, it also can be a powerfully emotional tool

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• Seriously: is this an email you are ever going to respond to? If it's more than a week or two old, either answer it or delete it now.

• focus on creating filters and scripts for any noisy, frequent, and non-urgent items which can be dealt with all at a pass and later.
• The idea of a filter is not to hide information that you really need, but to ensure that you aren't being interrupted constantly for what amounts to low-level noise
• make regular reading and culling of these filtered items a scheduled task
• mart email filtering is a process, and not a one-time event

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• The first and most workmanlike filter in your email processing scheme must involve very quickly deciding whether a given message can be deleted or archived immediately upon receipt
• Is there an action here? Will you really respond to this email? Or, will you, more likely, just let it sit there for an hour or a day or a decade
• Delete it, or -- if you're a big chicken like me -- archive it

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• I've counseled (ad nauseum) on the dangers of leaving your email app set to autocheck more often than every 15 minutes or so. Apart from generating an appalling number of pointless interruptions, persistent autocheck can also condition you into some really weird habits.
• The idea of not checking email for 30 minutes can cause hives, twitching, and minor bodily leakage. "What if I 'miss' something?"
• The problem in my observation, is that "always on" email checkers have a tendency not only to blow a lot of unnecessary time and attention on scanning the horizon, but that the quality of their resulting email work often suffers.
• And there's nothing that says you have set this schedule once and then never change it.

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  1. What does this message mean to me, and why do I care?
   
  2. What action, if any, does this message require of me?
   
  3. What's the most elegant way to close out this message and the nested action it contains?
• The key is to get super-fast at turning valuable messages into actions or placeholders for action

• Processing determines as quickly as possible what, if anything, to do with each piece (in ascending order of urgency and importance):

    
   
  • delete it
   
  • archive it
   
  • defer it for later response
   
  • generate an action from it
   
  • respond to it immediately (if it—literally—will take less than 2 minutes or is so Earth-shattering that it just can’t wait)
• The critical point, as ever, is to focus on action and not on the administration and housekeeping.

• The dirty little secret, of course, is that you don't do it by responding to each of those emails but by ruthlessly processing them.
• Here's the deal: your email has been accumulating because you don't have the time to answer it properly, which is certainly reasonable and accurate. You also fear losing track of the email you haven't responded to -- that it will fall between the cracks. This fear is also reasonable and accurate. But you're just as keenly aware that with the backlog of email you have plus the increasing rate of incoming messages you receive each day, you can't possibly ever catch up. This, sadly, is also entirely reasonable and accurate. It's all reasonable and it's all accurate, but come on: something's gotta give.
• Only when you're at zero do you return to "pending," concentrating on short responses and generation of to-dos

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• you may have noticed that most of your email is not only ephemeral -- relating to something that's only relevant for a short time -- but that a lot of it is remarkably unimportant
• . Be honest -- in the cold light of hindsight, how many of your messages were 5-alarm fires, and how many were kitties in a tree?
• ow much of your anxiety about unanswered messages was based on a lot of dead or just stupid stuff?
• If you did as I suggested and stayed in one mode at a time (Just delete and process, then just respond and generate actions), you doubtless found 5- or 10-minute periods where you were remarkably productive.

• So, if you're like me and most other people, you've learned four things:

    
   
  • You've been blowing a lot of time, anxiety, and adrenaline on stupid bullshit.
   
  • Fast processing and quick responding are the ninja email moves.
   
  • Your brain gives you treats when you stop making it worry all the time.
   
  • You can beat this game, but you have to recalibrate now.

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