It’s called “eighty-twenty” or the Pareto Principle: you get 80% of the bang from 20% of the buck. That’s one way to think of it. Here are some others:
- the top 20% of your customers provide 80% of your orders
- the worst 20% of your clients provide 80% of you headaches (OK, that might be an understatement!)
- the last 20% of “getting the job done” takes 80% of the time (whether or not you’ve budgeted that much time)
Photo: Denzil~
Eighty-twenty is a rule of thumb, not a rule of law (or even of mathematics), so instead of feeling sentenced to the consequences, you can use it as a starting point to reflect on what you’re doing and not doing.
Sometimes, it’s worth doing all 100%. Other times, it’s worth stopping after you’ve done the big-payoff 20%, using elsewhere the resources you’ve freed up by not continuing into the diminishing-returns region of the remaining 80%. Using eighty-twenty as one of your reflective tools, a tool to help to decide what to do and what not to do, can give you back the feeling that you have a choice.
Some things are meant to be done one bit at a time. Living life, for example. Life is lived as it comes, even though we might spend a lot of time and effort apparently ignoring our presence in the present.
Other things are best done in clumps or “bunches.” For me, processing emails is a task that works best with bunching. If I leave my email program open when trying to work on projects at my computer, the constant, distracting trickle of emails might not completely paralyze me, but it certainly reduces my concentration to undetectable levels.
The problems caused by a constant influx of email interruptions may not be news to you, but if you know the downsides, it’s very easy to fall back in to bad habits of email overexposure.
Batch processing and email are made for each other. Here’s how to do it. Pick a time when you can spend a reasonable amount of time going through email (whatever “a reasonable amount of time” is for you). When that time arrives, turn on your email program and read, write, file, and delete as necessary. Then turn your email program off.
Many people who field a lot of actionable email find they can manage with just two of these email batch sessions a day. They enjoy higher levels of concentration and find themselves more productive than they used to be when they were in their “always on” mode.
What are your “always on” issues? Would your life be made any easier, less hectic, or more enjoyable if you tried batch processing instead?
Photo: IsaacMao
Spam is a hassle, no argument there. But many people suffer under the weight of a growing email inbox, and the messages piling up there aren’t spam. They’re emails that need answers, or emails that provide reminders of pieces of projects that need to get done, or emails that just haven’t found their way into the right folder to be filed away.
Frequently the emails there are there only because the user can’t even remember exactly what they’re about…and isn’t sure if they can be deleted safely.
I know someone who has thousands of emails in her inbox. I can’t say it makes her more productive.
Several years ago, Lawrence Lessig declared email bankruptcy because he was hopelessly behind on responding to his email.
Many others have followed suit, some simply deleting all their messages and starting again.
I must admit, I’m tempted in this direction for my university email account, where I find most crises emerge, blossom, and resolve themselves without need for any input from me. But for email accounts that relate to actual, productive work, I’ve found a less drastic solution.
Simply put, I incorporate all my email into my Getting Things Done system.
- If an email requires a response, and if it takes less than two minutes to send the response, then I deal with the email right away (assuming I have the two minutes) and then delete it or file it in my single reference folder. It takes less time and effort to deal with the email immediately than it would take to keep track of it and take care of it later.
- If the email requires an action that will take longer than two minutes, I put it in my action required folder temporarily and add it to my Getting Things Done system as necessary when I have time. Once I’ve added it to my system, I delete it or file it in my single reference folder.
- If the email will be useful for reference, I file it in my single reference folder.
- If I know I won’t need to respond or act or refer to the email later, I delete it.
I keep my Getting Things Done system purring along using OmniFocus and iCal. My paper filing system is in two file cabinets, my electronic filing system is DevonThink, and my carry-along inbox is comprised of a small Scully Leather blank book and a Fisher Space Pen.
Yes, it took me a while to get Getting Things Done to this point, but the benefits are worth it. My inbox, fast as it may fill up, is usually empty by the end of the day, with everything responded to, filed, tracked for future action, or deleted.
I can’t claim perfect inner peace, but at least my email inbox isn’t standing in my way.
This is a post about “good enough.”
“Good enough” is not good enough when it is:
- shoddy work
- the result of not caring
- a manifestation of avoidance.
“Good enough” is an approach that’s justified (and possibly even optimal) when:
- you need to have something out there in the world to see how it does
- your belief that you can plan a future sequence of events is an erroneous belief in controllability
- you have perfectionist tendencies that keep you from getting anything done.
The project facing you is huge. Complicated. Overwhelmingly immense. How do you respond? Terror? Anger? Procrastination? A Zen laugh?
Photo: Yogi
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed when you’re looking at the mountain in front of you. But exactly how you look at the tangle of tasks can make the difference between responding (i.e. acting) and merely reacting.
How do you think about tasks and time?
Consider the difference between:
- There are many things that I need to have done
- There are many things that I need to do right now
#1 leaves you with no chance of feeling good about yourself. You’re already behind! Depending on your personality, this may or may not demoralize and paralyze you.
#2 leaves you open to a persistent case of information overload. With so many things to do right now, you’ve unwittingly given yourself yet another thing to do: figure out which of these zillion things you should really do right now! I know I don’t function well under this kind of pressure. You might be able to, but I’d still like to recommend another approach.
Spend a little time to decide, “what do I have to do first?”
Notice I didn’t say, decide what to do first, second, and third. This is not a plan-a-thon; it’s a survival strategy. You could think of it task triage. The first benefit is that you remove the additional pressure–the information overload pressure–of not knowing which of the many tasks facing you to address first. That’s pretty nice, already. But there’s another benefit that may trump any other you could think of.
With only one thing in front of you to do next, you will be able to start.
You have many choices in how you define that first task. Don’t make it too big. “Just sit down and write the novel” is too big. “Sit down and write the first chapter of the novel” is also too big.
Watch yourself: “Buy a ream of paper” might be too small, or, rather, it may just be you procrastinating. Or…it may in fact be the first thing you need to do before you can make any other forward progress on your novel. You’ve got to be honest with yourself here.
Once you have decided what it is you have to do first, and then after you have accomplished that task, the next step is clear: you decide (again), “what do I have to do first?”
Photo: jeremyfoo
I’ve written before about the virtues of David Allen’s Getting Things Done system. I still think there’s nothing like it for taming information overload and actually “getting things done.”
But it’s not easy for most mortals to keep the GTD machine purring along, day in and day out. There are times when I find myself adding more and more to my inbox without taking the time to process all the new material coming in. Soon, I have dozens of parallel projects that aren’t behaving.
They all seem to shout, “take care of me now!”
It can take me awhile to see that my GTD system needs a tune-up. Over the past couple of weeks for example, the tasks and projects kept piling up, and I thought I had everything organized well enough to manage them. But then I noticed how I was feeling: frustrated, overwhelmed, and under too much pressure.
I realized I hadn’t done my GTD “weekly review” for about three weeks.
The weekly review is where all the inbox items get processed. It’s a housecleaning of the mansion of projects. Not a full-blown spring cleaning, but the kind of cleaning where you at least go into all the rooms to make sure you know where you’re living.
When life is especially fluid, when projects are being born or morphing structurally every day, it can be moving too quickly to take good notes. But these are the times when it’s especially critical to regroup by doing your GTD weekly review.
I’m going to do mine today.