March 4th, 2009
Creating Laser-Like Focus With My Inbox
photo credit: urban_data
I haven’t written anything in a while. The time constraints of being a new dad and starting on a new business venture are insane, so I think I’ve avoided starting because I don’t have time to do the long posts that I’ve historically done on this blog. Here I’m taking a stab at a quick tip. Maybe this is the future of this blog.
I have a project that is taking a lot of mental energy right now. I can see the finish line, but everytime I’m distracted by something it takes me 20 minutes to mentally get back to where I was. So yesteday I moved every email that didn’t have to do with this project into a separate folder. Now my inbox only has the 10 or so emails related to this project.
Any new email that comes in automatically gets shoved into a separate folder. I’ll deal with all those when I get through with this project, but I MUST be able to focus on it without distractions for the time being.
Mar 21st, 2009
9:21 am
That’s a great idea. How has it been working for you?
I’ve found that sometimes the other things get forgotten about if they aren’t in my inbox.
Mar 25th, 2009
9:34 pm
@John Uri – In my case it worked pretty well. Since the big project I was working on really was the top priority, I wasn’t able to address any of the other emails anyway. It just took up my time to keep reading them, though, everytime I was in my email.
I’m not sure this approach works in every case, but if you have a big project that absolutely has to get done before you can tackle anything else: I recommend it.