I’ve been inbox 0 since a colleague showed me almost a decade ago. There has been some pushback but it does help having everything in categories for working on next. The goal of inbox 0 helps me get over the initial resistance of doing some of this stuff. And it’s the stuff I should not let linger.
 |
| Oh Outlook. How wrong you are. It's all in task folders. |
The trouble is that all the admin, much of it of dubious utility, does need to happen or email is flooded with “follow-up”. Basically university admin is why the book “a world without email” by Cal Newport was written. And inbox 0 may shift your activity to a day filled with vaportasks. Often marked as “high priority” too just so your flight or fight response is triggered something extra. Microsoft Teams/Outlook is especially prone to this sort of messages in its basic design with messages about messages etc.
I was listening to Cal Newport’s podcast and he advises to batch such tasks for a couple of slots in the week, rather than jumping from context to context. And this resonated because the inbox is a mix of tasks, even if it’s the tasks for today or this week, I still do a lot of task switching. It sounds trivial but it’s the kind of jumping around my brain does on its own already and it exhausts me. So if I am forced to jump around, it wears me out faster, and then I struggle more to stay on a single task.
So when Cal Newport talked about different categories he uses, I considered a way to help me beat the incessant drum that is university email. So I have made a new set of categories to put tasks while doing inbox 0:
Admin
Grad Student
Papers to read
Scheduling
Teaching
Undergraduate research
And then there is still “today”, “this week” “this month” and “someday” (let’s be honest that means “never”).
I have scheduled at 1pm “admin” and set a timer for 30min. Burn through as much as I can in that time and importantly not feel guilty about moving on to, you know, actual work.
I am testing this new system now and it is clearing up the mental load that is admin for sure. The real test will be when the fall semester starts in earnest.
