In addition to writing in details about how I manage my daily tsunami of tasks and activities (and in survive each day in general), I'm going to start a new, more serendipitous thread about random tips that I think of during my normal course of activity.These won't be structured at all, but will hopefully be helpful to some of the readers of this blog. So here goes my first one.
I got back from Tokyo last Friday (very cool to take off at 6 pm and land at noon - on the same day!) and then went camping (in cabins though) with my daughters overnight, spent all Saturday in activities at the camp site, rushed back home in the afternoon and attended a wedding on Saturday night, and then went to a carnival downtown on Sunday with my daughters. Needless to say, I was exhausted, but even worse: my email inbox was overflowing!
I've recently gotten into the habit of cleaning my inbox twice a day. It has a lot of positive side effects, but most notably I know that I'm on top of things. No timebombs. No lurking unread message about some time critical thing that you have to do before end of tomorrow or the world will end (spoiler: it never really does regardless). So this was unusally long for me and a bit frustrating. It was tempting to let it slide and start working on things instead. But I resisted the temptation and spent a couple of hours chopping the pile down and getting it to my favorite unread count: zero.
The point is, keep processing inbound traffic at a regular interval and don't let anything sit to rot. You will feel better about your work, you'll be more productive, and you'll know for sure that you really are in control.
That's it for the first tip, I'm going to try to post these tips regularly.
- Gummi
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