Inbox Zero
Merlin Mann has some great ideas about taking back control of your life. He emphasizes not seizing control, but constructively yielding to the unknown and managing the interplay between urgent and important tasks. Now I’ve gone and made it sound boring. AU CONTRAIRE! Merlin is endlessly entertaining! In this hilarious video, he talks about some of the ideas in the book he is writing, “Inbox Zero”:
You discover instead that you were scared of something that’s really easy to be scared of and not really that threatening. Once you get good at that [applying Inbox Zero], you discover there are much bigger things to be scared of — which is the extent to which you used to really rely on things like email to distract you from what you really should be doing.
I believe that — if you don’t believe that, I can’t help you. But if you think that might be true, if you think there might be times that you get much more involved in the thing that has got its hooks into you, rather than the thing that you really need to be doing… I really really believe that.
I also really believe in the lizard brain. I really believe — I don’t know if it’s the amygdala, I don’t know if it’s some part of the limbic system (I’ve not done research on this yet), but I do know that there’s an omnipresent voice in most of our heads that gives us terrible advice about how to avoid pain in the short term. And it’s almost always exactly the opposite of the advice we really need to get better at what we do. And so we obsess about “systems,” we obsess about this kind of tactical level of control stuff.
It’s one reason, to be honest, that Getting Things Done has started to drive me crazy, is the extent to which you have to know and control everything. Inbox Zero, I think, isn’t just about email — at the heart of it, Inbox Zero is about the amount of unknown, ambiguous, and incomplete items that you can tolerate in every part of your life. It’s not a system for smashing all of that down — it could be, I guess — but ultimately, I think Inbox Zero is about understanding what you can tolerate.
So what does that have to do with email?
If your sense of the unknown — if you can’t stand not knowing what’s in your inbox for more than 5 minutes, then that hook is into you — and you’re going to respond not to what you need to do with that stuff, but you’re going to be responding almost solely to that need to know the unknown. But then, once you know the unknown, you also generate the ambiguous, because you haven’t decided what to do with it. And if you’re really good and you figure out how to clarify the ambiguous, you still have to complete the incomplete.
And if all that stuff, the unknown, and the ambiguous, and the incomplete, all live in this same inbox — how is that not a recipe for insanity?
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But I really believe it’s about learning to iterate between the effective use of your time and the effective application of your attention.
Apropos of none of the above concepts: if I could make my hair like his, I don’t think I would ever wear it any other way.