I’m keeping it simple today, just sharing a link to a blog post by Cal Newport on how best to manage the avalanche of work demands that descend on knowledge workers each day through email, phone calls and Zoom meetings. Newport perfectly describes the way many of us are tempted to deal with this inundation: battling our inboxes all day, “switching haphazardly between the easy and unavoidably urgent.”
Newport’s recommendation involves using a simple text file to record incoming obligations and articulate the next action required to address it. As I’ve noted previously, there are features in Outlook that allow you to do this even more simply than Newport suggests, but what I like best about Newport’s post is his concise three-point case for why it’s so important to be methodical about capturing our commitments and converting them into a coherent list of next actions.
1. As David Allen argues, obligations that are kept only in your head cause stress and drain mental resources. An overwhelming number of tasks captured in a system that you regularly review will generate a fraction of the angst spawned by trying to instead pretend that those same tasks don’t exist.
2. Quantifying the impossibility of your assignments makes it much easier to argue for change. When you instead just battle your inbox all day, switching haphazardly between the easy and unavoidably urgent, you can convince yourself that you’re simply busy and need to hustle harder. Enumerating the absurd quantity of these demands will sharpen your conviction that something has to give.
3. You can optimize. If you have 400 tasks on your list, there’s no way you can accomplish them all in a single day. But if you can see all 400 obligations in one place, then you can choose the five or six that will have the biggest impact. This is almost certainly better than just jumping on whatever caught your attention most recently.
Cal Newport’s Study Hacks Blog – “On Confronting the Productivity Dragon (take 2)”