The blog

For you who pre­fer lis­ten­ing to read­ing, this post is also avail­able as an episode of the ​“Done!” pod­cast:

No more piles

Every day we do all kinds of things in many dif­fer­ent con­texts to try to reduce the dif­fer­ent piles. We make calls, for­mu­late, send, book, gath­er and more, to cross as many things as pos­si­ble from the pile of to-do-tasks. We clean out unnec­es­sary doc­u­ments from the com­put­er desk­top. We take out the receipts and notes from lasts week’s busi­ness trip and scan them into the com­put­er so that we do not have to keep them in their phys­i­cal form. We answer some emails and then again we begin call­ing, for­mu­lat­ing, send­ing and so forth, all over again.

Not fin­ished, but under control

The cir­cle can seem hope­less since it feels as if none of these piles ever will dis­ap­pear.
Will we ever be fin­ished? Prob­a­bly not. But with quite sim­ple means we will be able to feel caught up now and then, and this is a feel­ing well worth the effort to strive for.

Let us talk about the email inbox, because many I meet expe­ri­ence it as some­what of a con­stant, irri­tat­ing incon­ve­nience. If we resist the temp­ta­tion to save and store our emails in the inbox where we are meant to only look for new emails, we will feel caught up on a reg­u­lar basis. By not doing this, we auto­mat­i­cal­ly ​“reduce” the pile of emails, and feel at least a lit­tle lighter.

One out of three

You have unques­tion­ably heard this advice before, but you might still tend to leave emails lay­ing about in the inbox — and for a sig­nif­i­cant amount of time too. The rea­son prob­a­bly being one of the following:

• The email is unread.
• The email, or what it con­cerns, is unsolved.
• The email is read and solved, but you find no rea­son to move it. Let us, for the sake of sym­me­try, say that you are reluc­tant to put it some­where else.

In all three cas­es, we can do some­thing about it.

Do this

1. Take a look at your inbox right now.
2. If there are emails that are both read and solved, move them some­where else — for exam­ple to a file called ​“Archive” (if you need to keep them at all).
3. If there are emails that are read, but which are still not solved, for­mu­late what you need to do to solve them and make note of the result­ing to-do-task where you keep oth­er things you have not solved yet. This can be in the place where you keep your to-do-tasks or where you have got an overview of the more exten­sive tasks that need to be solved and which take more than a day to com­plete. Move or throw away the unsolved emails. The email inbox is not the place to mon­i­tor your tasks — this is prefer­ably done in a place or tool where you can see every­thing at once, for exam­ple, your to-do-list.
4. If there are unread emails, read them the next time you go through your inbox (some­thing we ought to do inten­tion­al­ly when we active­ly choose to rather than keep­ing its tab open all the time). Solve them instant­ly or write down what you need to do in order to solve them, and then move them some­where else oth­er than the inbox (same as above).

That’s it. It is not very hard, after all.

Caught up once again

If you do some­thing about your habit of leav­ing emails in the inbox even though you have read them, you will feel caught up more often. Instead of hav­ing this pile hang­ing over you, you will con­quer it — again and again.

What’s your way?

How do you quick­ly and swift­ly deal with the piles that tend to build up (even though we work dig­i­tal­ly and have got­ten rid of all the papers)? Tell me!

(By the way, have you noticed how essen­tial clear­ly writ­ten sub­ject lines are?