It's 2010. Do You Know How Many Emails Are In Your Inbox?

The new year presents an opportunity to revolutionize your relationship with email.  Many of us allow email to pile up and overwhelm us in a way that we would never permit to happen with physical clutter.

The good news is it's not that hard to develop healthier email habits.  Here are some ways to start: Start treating your email inbox like an inbox -- not a filing cabinet, calendar or reminder system. Would you keep 10,000 messages on your voicemail if you could?  Or allow five years worth of information to pile up in your physical inbox?  It's probably not the greatest idea to use your email inbox in this manner either.

The key to an inbox -- any inbox --  is that things come in, and are regularly processed out.  About a year ago, I went from 36,000 emails in my work inbox to ZERO.  Productivity guy Merlin Mann has written and spoken about how to do this -- his system is called -- wait for it -- Inbox Zero.

Unsubscribe from junk mail clutter. As a Gmail user, I find that I get very little spam.  Most of the "junk mail" I get is from lists I actually signed up for but no longer care about, or from one-time purchases that enrolled me in a lifetime of sale alerts.

Treat this stuff like what it is -- clutter -- and purge it.  Rather than ignoring or deleting each message as it comes in, open it, scroll down to the teensy-tiny print at the bottom of the message and hit "unsubscribe." And, when you make online purchases, think twice about opting-in to sale notices and updates.

Use your own email habits to lead by example. Hate getting work emails at 11:30 PM on a Sunday night?  Stop sending them yourself.  Your colleagues build their expectations about your availability based on how available you make yourself.  Most things can wait until morning.  Others will catch on.

Be intentional about checking your email. If you are being interrupted by the "ding" of incoming email every five minutes, you are allowing yourself to be interrupted about a 100 times during your work day.  Try turning off your automatic email notification for a couple of hours, for a day, or for good.

Check your email when you actually have the time and head-space to process what you'll find in your inbox, and when it won't serve as a distraction from the work you are doing.

What are your best strategies for keeping email under control?

Training Your Brain to Stop Putting Off That Vacation

The New York Times ran an interesting piece yesterday about pleasure procrastination: our tendency to put off things we actually want to do. Researchers have found that there are a couple of reasons we don't redeem gift cards or use our frequent flier miles. First, we mistakenly believe that we are too busy to engage in pleasurable activities now and that we will have more time to do so in the future.  Second, we don't want to settle for a good experience now when we imagine that we can create a perfect experience in the future. The problem comes when we habitually deny ourselves fun in the present moment because we are holding out for tomorrow. At best, we wind up with a drawer full of unused gift cards and Banana Republic winds up a little richer.  At worst, we wind up with a severely out-of-balance life, unable to allow ourselves (and probably those who are unfortunate enough to work for us) the "luxury" of a long vacation, a long weekend, or a long lunch.

I would argue that in order to stop pushing pleasure off into the future, we need to practice being present. Just as practicing scales is the foundation of mastering the piano, regular mindfulness meditation is practice for being present in daily life.

Mindfulness meditation is as simple as sitting for 5 minutes and focusing on your own breathing. Each time your mind drifts toward "what's for dinner tonight?" or "did I pay that bill?" gently bring your attention back to your breath. That's it. This is the "practice" in meditation: returning your attention to the present moment again, and again, and again.

Neuroscience confirms what meditators have long experienced: the more you practice meditation, the more easily you will be able to shift your awareness from the stories in your head to the present moment before you.  David Rock explains how mindfulness meditation retrains the circuitry networks in our brains so that we can be less caught up in narrative and more attune to the present moment.  He writes that over time,

You perceive more information about events occurring around you, as well as more accurate information about these events. Noticing more real-time information makes you more flexible in how you respond to the world. You also become less imprisoned by the past, your habits, expectations or assumptions, and more able to respond to events as they unfold.

That story that you've been telling yourself about the much-delayed vacation you'll take once everything is perfectly under control at work?  Much less convincing, when you are attuned to the reality of your present experience.

Does the concept of pleasure procrastination resonate with you?  What do you do to curb it?

My GTD Year in Review

This time last December, I was working in an office crammed with stuff.  Conference programs, old speeches, copies of travel receipts, notebooks brimming with ideas from half a decade ago, and drafts of reports long-ago published were filed and piled around me.  I wasn’t a hoarder – I just considered stacking things to be a valid organizing system. Since I was generally able to find what I needed when I needed it, I didn't consider myself disorganized.  Psychologically, my stacks served as a symbol of the important work that I was doing – work so important that it kept piling up and didn’t wait for me to get around to filing it.

At the same time, I knew my stacks weren’t really doing me any favors.  They took up valuable real estate on my desk, limiting my ability to spread out when I needed to do “big thinking” on projects. Occasionally I would fail to do something or be somewhere because the information I needed was buried and forgotten in a stack. I would sort through my stacks, filing and shredding from time to time, but the stacks never went away.  They were weighing me down.

Enter David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) system, recommended to me by a number of trusted colleagues.  GTD is a system for collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing, and doing all of the “stuff” that comes into our lives.  Though there are many different products & commentaries on GTD, the place to start is David Allen’s book, which is a cheap and quick read.

I embarked on the first stage of GTD during the week between Christmas and New Year’s.  For five days, I went through every piece of paper, every receipt and takeout menu. Armed with a label-maker, a stack of fresh file folders, and an inbox, I followed David Allen’s instructions and began to bring order to my office.  By the first week of 2009, I was back to work with an organized workspace and a new system in place.

My desk and my mind clear of clutter, I was able to clarify my priorities and take care of first things first.  Trusting that every email, meeting request, or task I agreed to do would be captured and processed in my system, I was able to shed the nagging feeling that something was falling through the cracks.   My follow-through on the commitments I made radically improved, and I developed peace of mind that I was doing what I should be doing at any given moment.

This summer, as I prepared to shift from full-time office worker to full-time student and part-time consultant, I brought GTD more fully into my home.  I set up a home office and have maintained a zero-tolerance policy on stacks of papers.  The only place that papers are allowed to pile up is in my inbox (which gets regularly emptied), meaning that on more days than not, my desk actually looks like the picture above.

I now allow myself the time to do the regular maintenance that I need to keep my work, and my life, moving in the direction I want to be going.  When I wasn’t giving regular attention to all of the things that needed attending to, stuff quite literally stacked up. I used to feel that I couldn’t afford to spend time “organizing” – work and life moved too fast.  Now I realize that I can’t afford not to.

This is not to say that life feels totally under control and my time spent is always aligned with my priorities – far from it. But GTD has helped me develop a “new normal” for myself.  And this calm, organized normal feels a lot better than the overwhelming stacks of unaddressed stuff I was living with before.

To Manage Workload, Right-Size Your Goals

A great takeaway from the Selah/Rockwood refresher training I attended yesterday: Workload = Goals / (Timeframe x Resources x Efficiency)

If your workload is unmanageable, the best way to tinker with this equation is to right-size your goals.

Why?

• The timeframe available for our work is often externally mandated.  We have to get the report done by the date of the board meeting, or the RFP is due on a certain date.
• Resources are something we also often have limited control over.  We only have $100,0oo in our budget, one part-time staffer to help with the event, etc.
• Efficiency is a place where many of us love to tinker but actual gains are modest.  Our ability to be more productive or efficient certainly helps move work along (and can greatly improve one's mental state), but doesn't really reduce workload if we have taken on too many commitments.

Our goals are where the biggest shifts are possible. How much are we committing ourselves to do?  Do we have three strategic goals for the year or seventeen? If our goals are unrealistically ambitious from the get, it is unlikely we will be able to make sufficient alterations to our timeframe, resources, or efficiency to regulate our workload.

Right-sizing goals can be hard -- especially for us social change folks, who have such big and long-term goals.  But we all know the alternative: burnout, disillusionment, and reduced effectiveness.  To be able to sustain ourselves as change agents over time, we need to make sure we are regulating our workload, and that means being more realistic about the goals we set for ourselves and our organizations.

How Many Minutes of Freedom Do You Want?

I haven't been blogging much because I have been in midterm-mode, writing paper after paper.  One thing has greatly assisted my productivity during this stressful time:  Freedom. Not "freedom," the enduring concept, but Freedom, an application for Mac that blocks your computer's access to the internet for up to eight hours at a time. You may have read about it recently (as I did) in the New York Times Magazine. Once you open Freedom, a window asks you "how many minutes of freedom do you want?"  and when you enter your desired time, Freedom blocks your internet access for that long.  You can't get desperate and quit the program; the only way to override Freedom is to restart your computer.  I'm not going to say I've never cracked and done the restart, but it is certainly a deterrent.

The amazing result:  free from email, Twitter, Facebook, the New York Times, and Googling every person, place or thing that pops in my head, I can actually concentrate and write.

Using Freedom has made me more mindful of just how much my  mind craves distraction, even when I am supposedly "focused" on a task.   I still find myself reflexively clicking on my browser whenever the sentence I am trying to write escapes me.  My mind thinks, "I can't figure out how to word this idea... hmm... let me go check my email/10 websites and come back to this..."  Only with Freedom running, my browser gives me an error message and prevents the bad habit.  It is like a subtle kick in the pants that says, "Not so fast, stick with it, get back to work."

Mac users, try out Freedom at macfreedom.com.  It's free!