Inbox, diary, to-do list: now choose just two

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9 highlights

  • Emails, messages and quick calls have become like a tax we all collect from each other every day, every week. Does it have to be that way?

  • I don’t subcribe to either of the three most common responses: (1) fatalism – simply accepting that you’re never going to be on top of stuff or (2) naive optimism which assumes some magic fix is just around the corner to be uncovered that fixes it all with no additional work or (3) resignation that a sunday evening going through messages is the new monday morning.

  • How can we get better? Well one approach is to adhere to something like the Getting Things Done (GTD) approach advocated by productivity guru David Allen.

  • Another paradigm to think about here is the “Deep Work” approach of Cal Newport – where significant blocks of time are set aside for real work with no meetings and no distractions

  • Another approach is to re-imagine the to-do list (which for many is little more than a vague wish-list of things they’d like to do) to something more action oriented and specific – for example at the start of the week setting out a “it’s not the weekend till 
 ” list which contains three things that just have to get done before you can power off on a friday evening, and also notebooks which allow you to capture a helicopter view of the entire week’s appointments, key to-do and projects like this.

  • Another approach is to recognise the one common strand of all the above configurations: calendar. That’s the one thing we almost always honour, as it’s hard/awkward to get out of a commitment to a physical or virtual presence. But are we going to the right meetings?

  • It’s a bit like what Greg Mckeown talks about in the book essentialism. The best way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.

  • As Steve Jobs famously said: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.

  • I’d go as far as to say that if you are a knowledge worker in the 21st century and you are not employing some sort of system around you to help overcome distraction, focus and beat mental shortcomings, it’s like trying to farm the land with your bare hands. It might work for a while, but ultimately it’s unproductive and you’ll get left behind.

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