People who know me often ask how I manage my life and my time. How do I fit everything in? How do I manage to do all the things that I do? I usually giggle nervously, because I don't really have an answer - or at least, the answer I have is not the one they want to hear.
The answer is that I don't. I've just (please forgive me, everyone) deleted about 60 blog post notifications from Google Reader. Most of them are work related ones (stuff on education, IT, etc) or else photo blogs. Right now, I just don't have the energy to read them, and if I let them pile up, I know I won't be inspired to read them when I get back to work. There's nothing worse than opening Reader and seeing that I have over 200 posts to read.
I recently read 'Getting Things Done' by David Allen, and then some blog posts by 43folders. They both advocate having an inbox that has zero emails sitting in it. I've started adhering to that policy (there's a whole methodology that goes with it; read the book/ blog posts if you're interested, or ask me for details), and it really works. I've not only been more productive, but I no longer dread opening my inbox, because there are all these hundreds of emails just SITTING there.
About 6 weeks ago I decided to take the same approach to my Reader. If I hadn't made time to read it during the week, I was honest with myself that I probably wouldn't read it, and so would just delete the whole stack, unread. I figured that if there was something really incredible, or a real WOW factor to it, I'd hear about it via Twitter, or some other source, soon enough, or I could probably research it myself if it was something I was particularly interested in. Thus, I reckoned, deleting something I hadn't read wasn't actually going to impoverish my life dramatically. It would simply remove the stress I had been feeling about not being able to keep up with the pace of information streaming itself to me.
The result is that I now feel able to spend time really reading the posts that are by people I love, friends, or anything else that really piques my interest. By using Reader, if I run out of things to read, I know that I can also go back and read the stuff I didn't get a chance to read previously, even if I've "marked it as read", which is nice - as it's never really lost to me.
And that, my friends, is one of the ways in which I manage. I set aside a predefined amount of time per week to read work-related blogs, and anything I don't read in that time is deleted. Poof! No more stress (for that area of my life anyway :))
3 comments:
would it be completely lazy, annoying and counter-productive to ask you to share the gist of the getting things done / 43 folders theory?
LOL! Not at all! The gist of it is this:
1) Set aside a specific, limited time every day to read and deal with new emails. (e.g. 10 mins every 3 hours) 2) If it's not your dedicated timeslot, don't be tempted to read new emails. To help, set Outlook to only retrieve emails every 3 hours, or whatever, rather than the usual every 10 mins.
3) Mentally categorise each email you receive - important but can't deal with right now, can action in less than 2 mins, delete. (Those are the only allowed categories!)
4) If you can action an email in less than 2 mins, then do it immediately.
5) If not, then either delete it, or move it to an appropriate folder and flag it for follow-up. (Do you know how to use flags in Outlook??)
6) When flagging something, be realistic about it (SMART targets - do you know about those? Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Time-sensitive.)
7) Regularly review your task pane to check what you need to be doing, and whether you need to shift any of your flags for a later date.
There's a lot more, but this is the bare bones and I've found it INCREDIBLY helpful - especially the part about only having 3 categories. Either deal with it now, delete it, or folder-flag it. Don't leave it sitting in your inbox to clutter up your mind!
If you have time though, I would really recommend you start by reading David Allen's 'Getting things done'. The 43folders stuff makes more practical sense if you already have Allen's paradigm on dealing with information, work and productivity.
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