Nontrivial Exercises

Inbox Zero and Making Sandwiches

I just watched Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero tech talk he gave to Google last week. I’m a big fan of David Allen’s GTD methodology - read the book, organized my projects, got the t-shirt - and so I’ve already bought into the philosophy of de-cluttering and acting on things as soon as possible.

Yet, what I know and what I do are often different. Over the past year and a half I’ve really let my discipline slide in the area of managing my email. Both my work and my personal inboxes have swelled to between 200 and 500 emails, most of which are read.

Merlin’s talk inspired me to deal with my problem. The most profound thing he said to me was his analogy of the process at a deli.

Customers come in, stand in line, then order their food. A worker takes their order, then gives it to the cook who makes the desired sandwich.

It’s not really important to the operation of the deli just how they take the orders, whether they’re stacked a certain way, organized alphabetically, taken on special paper or electronically. The orders are simply the means to get to the creation and delivery of the sandwich.

It is so easy for technophiles who are attracted to shiny computer objects to get hung up on the system and lose sight of the reason they have a system. I’ve tried a few different systems to manage my GTD - Microsoft OneNote, wikis, GTD Outlook Add-In, paper to name a few - and I consistently get distracted by fiddling with the system.

I forget that the reason I have the system is to make sandwiches.

What I re-learned from Merlin is the imperative of actually doing your work rather than organizing your work. Act on every email you can before you categorize it, put it in a project, annotate it, organize it or color it shades of green. Make the system as transparent as possible and actually do stuff.

I’ve implemented my Inbox DMZ in both my work and personal email systems as of 2 days ago, and currently have both inboxes at zero. I’ve gotten a lot more done in the last 2 days with regards to email than I have in quite a while.

Merlin has a nice series on 43Folders on the idea of Inbox Zero, and his Google Tech Talk is below.

Technorati Tags:
inboxzero, merlin mann, gtd, productivity