[fr]
Cet article fait le tour de ma méthode pour gérer le flux d'e-mail qui assaillit quotidiennement ma boîte de réception ainsi que le flux de vaisselle sale qui remplit inexorablement l'évier. Deux choses qui a priori n'ont rien à voir, mais qui au fond peuvent faire l'objet du même processus.
[en]
I’m a rather disorganised person. I know it comes as a surprise to many of my readers, because my online presence is reasonably organised (in the highly disorganised digital space we live in) and also probably because my writing is, well, pretty structured or something.
I’m a reformed perfectionist (in some areas). I’m somebody who read A Perfect Mess with glee, because it validated a conclusion I’d reached myself over the years: find the sweet spot between too much mess and too much order.
A few years ago I wrote a blog post titled Keeping The Flat Clean: Living Space As User Interface, after I realised that usability principles and accessibility apply to living space too, not only to websites (nothing revolutionary for the world, but it was for me). This kind of thinking has never left me.
So, what does keeping one’s inbox empty and taming the dirty dishes have in common? It hit me the other day.
It’s about keeping some constantly filling “bucket” from overflowing. It’s about having a process to deal with what comes in on a regular basis, and seeing the bottom every now and again.
Over the last year or so, I haven’t been too bad with e-mail. Here are my seven tricks:
- turn off notifiers but check regularly
- reply immediately to “small stuff” that doesn’t require much brain power
- archive, archive, archive: stuff I’ve dealt with, as well as bacn (I create filters for bacn)
- stay on top of the “longer” stuff I need to reply to, at max a few days after getting it
- identify the stuff I “should” spend time replying to but for some reason I won’t, and deal with it accordingly instead of letting it rot in the inbox for six months before giving up
- if things go out of control, I still try to keep up with what’s incoming so it doesn’t get more out of control, and take stabs at archiving/processing the backlog (in that way, my inbox hovered around a stable 300-400 messages in it for most of last year)
- if things are too out of control, I don’t hesitate to do a radical “inbox to zero” (my way).
Result:
- my inbox regularly goes down to zero (about once a week or so)
- there are usually between a couple and a dozen e-mails in my inbox
- people are happy because I’m responsive to their e-mails
- I’m happy because I’m on top of my e-mail (“empty inbox” has a very interesting psychological effect).
Caveats?
- I’m not regularly active on any mailing-lists, and filter them all out
- my estimation is that approx 100 messages a day reach my inbox, bacn included
- I have to “deal” with 30-40 message a day, probably, once you substract what has been filtered out.
So, what about the dishes? I’ve actually been really bad at keeping up with my dirty dishes over the last year (and cleaning in general, ack). A few weeks ago when I was sick, I decided to take control of my kitchen again, if only so that mess in the kitchen would not:
- depress me
- get in the way of preparing food and eating regularly.
So, I did the kitchen equivalent of “emptying the inbox to zero” to get a fresh start (warning: this goes a little beyond dishes). Taking inspiration on my inbox mastery, here’s what I did:
- put all the clean dishes away (they tend to pile up on the draining board)
- washed all the dirty dishes, and put them away a little later once they had dried
- cleared the kitchen table of all the junk that was on it and cleaned it
- did the same thing with one of the working surfaces and the stove
That was my “kitchen to zero” state. The process for keeping things that way is pretty basic:
- make sure I see the bottom of my sink regularly (every day if possible, in the evening so it’s clean in the morning — no rigid rule, but an objective I try to meet regularly)
- make sure the draining board is regularly empty
- near-to-zero tolerance for anything remaining on the kitchen table and working surface once I’m done eating/cooking
It’s been working well so far. Here’s what I think are the three keys that my systems for e-mail and washing dishes have in common:
- go for emptiness: seeing the bottom is important, psychologically
- flexible “keep the spirit” approach rather than rigid rule: keeps me from feeling “failure guilt” when I slip a bit, and provides living space (life does not fit in rigid rules)
- contingency plan for when I drop off: I know I’ll drop off at times, but I know how to get “back on track” when I do (GTD taught me that was vital)
I’m interested in hearing if you use similar methods, or different ones, and what you think of my “three keys” to a successful system. Does it work for you, or not?
Similar Posts:
- The Wisdom of Small Changes: Incrementally Reclaiming My Flat
- Keeping The Flat Clean: Living Space As User Interface
- Inbox to Zero in no Time
- Just do it
- A Week of FlyLady Inspiration
- Taming the Dirty Dishes
- Be Your Own Best Friend
- Slowing Down: About Cleaning, Laundry, Accounting, and Backlogs
- My Journey Out of Procrastination: Five Principles
- My Journey Out of Procrastination: Doing Things Now
Digital Crumble
Delicious! A Great Bookmarks Manager
Now, why on earth didn’t I start using delicious ages ago, when I first stumbled upon it? Maybe it didn’t look pretty enough, and didn’t flaunt its features loudly enough for me?
A couple of days ago I paid delicious another visit. See, somebody on #joiito mentioned my Keeping the Flat Clean post, and I suddenly found there was a bunch of people from delicious visiting that article. I thought: “My, people are actually using this thing!” and signed up for an account.
So… what does delicious do? It allows you to easily add pages you visit to your bookmarks, using intelligent bookmarklets (two clicks and no typing to add a link if you want to be minimalist). This is already easier than what I have to do to add links to my LinkBall.
You can categorize your bookmarks very easily by typing words in the “tag” field of the bookmarklet. No need to define categories — delicious takes care of it all for you. You can then view your bookmarks by category or (and this is where it gets interesting) all the bookmarks marked with a same tag. Each bookmark in your list is one-click editable, and each bookmark in somebody else’s list is one-click copyable. For each link, you can also view a list of all the users who have bookmarked it.
Does it stop there? No. All the bookmark lists (by user or by tag) are available in RSS and can be subscribed to within delicious. As a user, you have an Inbox which aggregates the feeds you have subscribed to. You may subscribe to a “user feed” or a “tag (category) feed”. On top of that, bookmark lists are available in plain html, and many users have contributed various hacks which can help you integrate your bookmarks with your weblog. (Update 02.06.04: one thing you shouldn’t do, though, is simply include that HTML feed with a PHP include or an iframe, as this will cause the delicious server to be hit each time somebody views your page.)
If you aren’t a user of delicious yet, you need to go and register right now.
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