Some good observations from David Allen in Making It All Work:
Working your process takes time. As I described in chapter 6 on clarifying, it usually requires an hour a day just to stay current with the typical volume of information.
That’s a highly productive expenditure of time, during which you’ll be thinking, making decisions, completing short actions, routing data, communicating, and defining and organizing new work. But it’s not the kind of activity you can do while you’re working on longer tasks or in meetings.
Though many executives find it useful to leave the first hour or so of the morning open for it, processing time is something that you may not find easy to block out. Some people have a stable enough work environment to allow for clearing the decks first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening, but you may simply have to clean up your in-basket “between the lines” — whenever you can as you move through your day.
The critical factor is to be aware that it will take time. If you allow yourself to be booked in meetings through an entire day, you will fall at least an hour behind in your processing. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, as long as you realize that you will have to “pay the Piper [that is, John Piper — just kidding!]” sometime soon. Many, however, don’t seem to realize or accept this reality and then operate in a constant state of frustration over having to make up the lost time. That’s like complaining that taking a shower eats into your day!
People who get accustomed to the true amount of time and energy required for these procedures begin to incorporate it into the stride of their life and work, instead of railing against it.