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When You Can't Get Your Email Done: Get Up Earlier

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My standard practice is to clear out my inbox as one of the first tasks in my daily routine, first thing in the morning.

Today I started at 7:30 and then had some appointments start at 9:00. I wasn’t able to get through all of my email. I think I will be able to make some time later this afternoon to get the rest of it taken care of, but by then there will be a lot of new messages.

I prefer to get all of it taken care of right at the beginning of the day, and then maybe continue zeroing out new email every hour or every four hours. This always works best when at the very first round, first thing in the morning, you can get everything dealt with.

So what do you do when you aren’t able to get through everything the first time? You need to get up earlier.

Sometimes you do need to do seasons where you have to let things build up in the working folders, as I’ve blogged on previously. And sometimes you need to take “email vacations,” as I’ve also blogged on.

But as a standard practice, which is my plan for this week and most weeks, you need to zero out your inbox every morning at least — without having anything leftover for later in the day (except new stuff that comes). When the time that takes doesn’t fit, get up earlier.

You have to deal with those emails at some point. Whether you deal with them now or in three days, they are going to take the same amount of time (nuance: though sometimes email creates more email, which is the rationale behind email vacations).

The other thing you can do is implement strategies to reduce your email volume (discussed in How To Get People to Send You Less Email). But if you are going to be keeping up with your email, at root one of the basic things you need to do is make time for it.

New GTD Paper Planner Now Available

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While I recommend going fully digital with your planning, some folks might still prefer to be paper-based.

For those of you who work best that way, the first ever paper planner structured for GTD implementation has now been released from the David Allen Company.

Here’s what they have to say about it:

Introducing the first paper planner embedded with GTD intelligence. The GTD Coordinator. Inside you’ll find tabs and pages categorized to fit the GTD methodology, education on the principles and best practices of GTD, calendar pages, and how-to sample pages to assist you in creating the most effective and usable planner to meet your individaul style and needs.

It looks like it has these sections, based on the website description:

  • Notes/In
  • Calendar
  • Action Lists
  • Agendas
  • Projects/Goals
  • Project Plans/Notes
  • Reference/Misc.
  • Contacts

That organization should be helpful. However, here are a few things I would change. First, I would not have a section with “miscellaneous” in the title. I don’t believe miscellaneous is a helpful category (just like I don’t believe in junk drawers — there are no junk drawers in our house). The concept of “reference” is fully accurate in itself for the name of this tab.

Second, I would have “projects” and “goals” be different tabs, because projects and goals are different.

Third, I would not have a separate section for project plans. Instead, project plans should be integrated right in with the projects list. In other words, you should put your project plan sheets right after the project list in the “projects” tab. Goal plans should be handled this way as well in the “goals” section.

Fourth, I would consider not having an “agendas” tab, because agendas are really a type of action list, which already has a tab. However, I do see value in having agendas out separately (there is a whole lot more that could be said here), so I don’t lean too strongly in that direction.

Back when I used a paper planner, these are the tabs I created:

  • Calendar
  • In/Notes
  • Actions
  • Projects
  • Goals
  • Mission
  • Operations
  • Reference
  • Contacts

The website points out that the GTD Coordinator is still in beta, so if you do purchase it your feedback would probably be appreciated as they create the final version of the product. It looks like it has the potential to be a very useful productivity tool for those that are paper-based.

Top Productivity Tips

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There are dozens of points that could rightly be classified as “top productivity tips.”

Here are 6 that are worth highlighting, which for a time I kept on a checklist in the back of my planner (back before going fully digital; I added number 5 just now to expand on the main intention behind point 4):

  1. Rise early
  2. Start with the most important tasks
  3. Do not multi-task (unless the nature of the task is to multi-task)
  4. Prevent interruptions (but make time for people)
  5. Organize your time into the largest continuous blocks possible
  6. Actually do what you need to do

What would your top tips be?

Filing vs. Piling

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In general, I highly discourage putting information or things you need to act on into piles. Filing is more organized and easier, if done right. But there are some exceptions. Here is a breakdown on when to file and when to pile.

When to Pile

Create piles for things that you are working on at the moment or will be working through in the next few hours. Used in this sense, piling becomes a fairly simple and effective a way of organizing your workflow.

Here is an example. I was just going through my inbox at home yesterday. It included some ideas I had written down on paper (normally I try to put ideas I want to do something about directly into OmniFocus as inbox items electronically, but sometimes it works best to jot them down on paper), receipts that needed to be entered into Quicken, some bank statements to reconcile, various small 4-minute-or-so actions, and various things to file.

I could have deferred most of these actions and put them into the set of pending files that I have for my routine actions. But there was quite a bit of stuff, and I wanted to do all these actions right away to get them over with. So I created a pile for each type of action and sorted the items into those piles as I processed my inbox.

Here are the piles I created: Receipts to enter, notes to process, bank statements to reconcile, bills to pay, things to file, and “other small actions” to take. Then I went through the piles one by one and took care of everything in them (entered all the receipts into Quicken, paid any bills and set up auto payment for the ones I could [we just moved], processed the ideas into projects and actions, and so forth).

Piles are effective in situations like these because they are temporary. It is helpful to have your work laid out and visible before you. Then you go from one pile to the next until you are done.

But piles are ineffective if you keep them longer than a few hours. The key is to get through them right away, not let them sit for days. If you do that, the actions get stale — unless you turn to filing.

When to File

If you are going to defer working on a group of items, then they should go into a file, and the action to complete those items should go on your next action list. I’ve noticed some routine types of actions that recur every time I go through my inbox: receipts to enter, ideas to process, and so forth — basically the piles I listed above. So I have created a set of files that correspond to these types of actions.

I call these “pending files.” They are holding tanks for work I am going to be attending to shortly. In the example above, I wanted to deal with all the actions coming from the processing of my inbox right away. So I created piles and worked through them immediately. But if I had wanted to defer those actions, I would have just put them into the appropriate pending files. To make sure I wouldn’t forget to actually deal with the items in those files, I have a weekly task to empty each of them completely (every Saturday morning).

For stuff that doesn’t fall into a routine pending file, I have a “catch-all” pending file called (creatively), “general.” Whenever there is support material I need for any action not covered by one of my routine pending files, I put the support material into the “general pending” file and then put the action on my next action list (and make note that the support material is in pending).

For example, if I get a long contract I need to review at work before signing, and I don’t have the time to review it right away, I’ll put the contract in my “general pending” file and then create a next action to review the contract. I would not, on the other hand, just leave the contract on my desk as a “reminder.”

It is an important principle that you should manage your actions from a list (with any needed support material in a file), not from piles — with the one exception being when you are going to work through the piles right away.

This discussion has focused on filing vs. piling when it comes to actionable documents. When it comes to storing reference material and project documents, filing without question is the way to go. There is a whole system that can be applied to filing in this sense which I’ll be talking about soon.

What I Learned About Productivity from Taco Bell

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A few years ago I was waiting in line for my order at Taco Bell, and I thought to myself “these guys have a better productivity system than I do.”

I had been doing GTD for a while, but things still weren’t clicking. What stood out to me was how simple of a system they had at Taco Bell for processing orders: it just listed the items they had to make for each order.

Very simple. Very, very simple. Here’s what’s intriguing: In the GTD methodology, each of those items in an order is technically a “project” because it involves more than one step. But obviously if the order system had broken those items down into their actual “next actions” (“now grab a handful of cheese, then a cup of chicken and put it in the tortilla”), you would have chaos and confusion.

The problem is that that is exactly the way I had been handling my next actions list. I was dividing tasks up into pieces that were way too granular. Since in GTD your “next actions” are on a different list from your “projects,” this was really confusing — I couldn’t keep track of which actions pertained to which projects. Further, after completing an action, the natural thing would be to do the next “action” on the project — but my system didn’t facilitate this, because each project only had one action on my next action list. So instead of moving ahead on the same project after completing an action, I’d move on to a different project — highly inefficient and scattering to your efforts.

This was a mess. I don’t blame GTD for this — nothing in it says that you need to get this granular. But it sure sounds that way at first. It is easy to implement GTD wrongly by making your actions too granular.

There are a lot of solutions here that make GTD much more effective, even if you haven’t been taking things to the granularity that I was. Sometime soon I plan on writing something fairly comprehensive on this.

But in the meantime, the most significant solution is what I took away from the cooks at Taco Bell: I started defining my next actions not according to real specific steps (highly literal “next actions”), but according to what I can accomplish in one sitting.

In other words, I don’t always ask literally “what’s the next physical action I can take here,” because that can really make things overly-specific. Rather, I ask “what is the outcome I can accomplish here in one sitting.” The result is that many things that would have otherwise been projects actually become straight next actions, thus de-cluttering my projects list. Projects become more the multi-step things that need to be done over the course of several days.

So there has been a shift in my thinking, in part, from defining projects as “multi-step outcomes” to “multi-step outcomes that I won’t do in one sitting.” And when defining a next action for a project, I try to actually create an action that will trigger a series of steps, not just one, by asking “what can I do in one sitting,” rather than “what’s the next specific, literal thing this project requires.”

This is like Taco Bell: You see “make steak taco” and you make the taco. Very simple. But if your next action list is at the level of “put in the cheese, add the meat, etc.,” that’s just tough.

(BTW: The folks at Taco Bell on Franklin Ave in Minneapolis are some of the fastest I’ve ever seen. Way to go!)

2 Easy Ergonomics Tips for Your Computer

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I just got a stand to set my laptop on while it’s on my desk and connected to my other monitor. The user’s guide had two helpful ergonomics tips in it:

  1. Center your external keyboard with your screen.
  2. Put your screen at eye level and arm distance.

The idea of putting your monitor at arm distance was new to me, and is already proving incredibly helpful. First, it’s probably better on my eyes. Second, I find that I simply enjoy using my computer more when my monitor is farther away.

That’s a simple change that I’ve found to have significant results.

Stop Interrupting Yourself

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Interruptions are not necessarily things other people do to you. The biggest type of interruption is what you do to yourself by constantly switching gears from one unrelated task to another.

Chunk your time by focusing on important tasks in large segments, and grouping similar tasks together, to prevent this.

The Better You Get, the Better You'd Better Get

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David Allen’s second book, Ready for Anything: 52 Productivity Principles for Work and Life, has a lot of helpful points.

One chapter in there is called “the better you get, the better you’d better get.” Very provocative, and very true.

His point is that as you become more efficient and effective and produce more with less effort, “it graduates your responsibilities and your attraction to bigger problems and opportunities — automatically. Hang on. Increasing your effectiveness is not the easy path, though it is by far the most rewarding” (p. 124).

In other words, as you become more effective, more room is created to do things and so you automatically start to take on more and tackle more difficult opportunities. So, in turn, you have to become even more effective to handle those.

That is so interesting and could be pondered in great detail. It echoes a principle that exists in many areas. For example, a few years ago I was reading a book on energy, The Bottomless Well. It made the point that increased energy efficiency has not decreased energy usage but rather increased it.

For example, as computers become more energy efficient, we don’t keep using them to do the same amount of work we did before. Rather, over time we begin to do more with them, thus using more energy overall. “Efficiency increases consumption. It makes what we ultimately consume cheaper, and lower price almost always increases consumption. To curb energy consumption, you have to lower efficiency, not raise it. But nobody, it seems, is in favor of that. [And rightly so!]” (p. 123).

So this is the interesting paradox: If you want to do less, you should actually become less efficient and less effective. But that’s clearly not the right path. That is the path of lethargy, and it is not virtuous. (And you’ll only be doing “less” in the sense of less output — your effort to get that smaller output will be much higher.)

Instead, as you become more effective, you need to in turn increase your effectiveness even more in order to handle the greater responsibilities that you will naturally be tackling. And you will need to become even better at prioritizing and determining what, out of all the new opportunities before you, is best to focus on. As Allen writes, “this is not the easy path. But it is the most rewarding.”

Quickly Switching Between Tabs in Firefox and IE

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When you have multiple tabs open in Firefox or IE, you can switch between them quickly using control + tab.

Everyone knows that you can quickly switch between programs (for example, Firefox and Word) using command + tab (in a Mac) and alt + tab (in Windows). But it used to bug me that I couldn’t switch between tabs within my web browser with similar efficiency.

Turns out I just didn’t know how. Finally, the other day I discovered this by mistake. Probably most of you already knew this — it’s a bit humbling to acknowledge that I didn’t know that already! But for any of you who, like me, hadn’t yet figured out that control + tab switches between tabs, hopefully this can save you some time.

When to Break the Rules with Email, 2: Email Vacations

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As I discuss in my series of posts on email, one of the best practices for email management is to process your email inbox to zero every day. This is both doable and fundamental to effective workflow.

But there are times when your overall workflow is best served by taking a few days off from email — by taking an email vacation, even though you continue to do your other work during that time.

Why Email Vacations Can Be Helpful

Why would you need to take an email vacation? Well, sometimes you might have a project that is so large that it deserves concentrated focus for a period of several days. Checking your email during this period can disrupt your flow and take you out of the zone, thus diminishing your effectiveness and extending the time the project takes. Plus, email could open up a long rabbit trail that will take you away from the project entirely.

Other times, you may have just had enough and need a break. This is OK. In fact, sometimes you can find yourself in a vicious cycle where accomplishing email-related work is simply creating more work. You feel like you aren’t getting anywhere because completing things is just opening up way more loops that need to be addressed. Sometimes the best way to address that situation is to step away from email for a day or two and let things settle out.

Being productive is not about gutting out your email regardless of how you feel or what your situation is. Rather, being productive is precisely what enables you to take the time to step back, gain perspective, and take a day or two away from email. In fact, this is not only made possible by being productive, but is probably a necessary part of the foundation for remaining productive.

As I write this, this idea is beginning to feel more radical than I first thought, even though I have done this off and on for many years. It feels very strange to say “take a day or two away from email if you need.” That feels risky. And if you did it arbitrarily, it would be. So let me give you an example and then a few principles.

An Example

Here’s an example. We just moved into a new house, and so we have had all of the unpacking and organizing and various stuff that goes along with a move. So I just took a five day email vacation to finish this up as quickly as possible. (By the way, for anyone wondering from my earlier comment whether there could be any type of project that doesn’t require email, this is one example!)

The open loops involved in needing to get your house put away and office setup are the kind that create drag on your life if not dealt with quickly. So I decided it would be most effective to shut email off and get the remaining things done in 5 days rather than also do all my regular email and online stuff during that time and extend the project to 8 days or more. Also, I like being able to focus like this.

It just so happened that these last 5 days fell over the Thanksgiving holiday. So, one could object that this really wasn’t an email holiday — most people had a long weekend. But that gets to one of the key principles in all this: you need to time your email vacations strategically. I intentionally put my “email vacation” during a time when it would have minimal impact on my ongoing responsibilities. (Plus, I normally would have kept up with email at least 3 out of those 5 days, so this was a real email vacation.)

Another thing I wanted to do over the holiday was relax, and the email break served that as well. Finishing all the move-in stuff, plus keeping up with my email, would have likely meant that email would have actually taken the place of the time I needed to spend relaxing with my family.

Now, because I took 5 days away from email, I’m in a much better place to keep up with my email and ongoing responsibilities this week with minimal drag (not having all the move-in stuff hanging over my head and diverting my focus). By segmenting the last part of my move-in project from email, rather than doing both currently, both are actually accomplished more quickly.

So this email vacation was not contrary to being effective with email, but actually served that cause. And it is not contrary to the fundamental principle of processing your email to zero every day, but rather is one of the primary benefits of keeping up with email.

What Makes Email Vacations Possible

In other words, processing email to zero every day is precisely what makes email vacations possible. First, if you are current with your email, you don’t need to worry that you are forgetting about some huge task buried in your inbox. Second, because you know you’ll be getting your email right back to zero in a few days and be right back on top of things.

Best Practices for Email Vacations

Last, let me suggest a few best practices for taking email vacations. First, I already mentioned that you should time them strategically. Don’t take them arbitrarily (although sometimes you will spontaneously need to take one, which is just fine), but seek to place them in spots that will create minimal disruption.

Second, remain available by other means for important matters that are highly urgent. For example, the people you work with should know they can reach you by phone or text message whenever there is an immediate need.

Third, if you are taking more than a one-day email vacation and its during the work-week, it’s probably the best idea to create an auto response saying you’ll be away from email. I didn’t do this (sorry) because I forgot, but the fact that my 5-day email vacation was over a holiday weekend reduced the need for that.