I’m in the middle of a couple of big, valuable, but tiring and potentially overwhelming projects.

One is a paper I’m writing with a small, all-volunteer group, on behalf of an organization I’m a devoted member of. There’s a lot of conflict and dissension involved—not on our writing team, but around the situation that we’re being asked to write about. The conflict is no surprise, but it adds to the stress and fatigue.

The other is a corporate training program I’m creating—also, interestingly, having to do with conflict, negotiation, and communication.

I have confidence (in the abstract) that both projects will turn out well. But the process of creating them has been or threatens to be more painful and difficult than I think is necessary. That’s a pattern for me, and I’d like to break it.

One way to do that is to see if I can make steady progress, in short work sessions, rather than bingeing (as Robert Boice calls it).

Another is to depart from my lone wolf approach. After all those years as a freelance writer, I’m used to Doing Everything Myself. I’m not in the habit of asking for help.

Changing my m.o.

For the writing project, which I’m currently editing, my usual m.o. is to try to mind-read the other contributors and come up with the perfect phrasing to express what I think everybody means. The alternative I intend to try is to get the other committee members on the phone and hash it out together. In fact, that’s how we were working during the conceptual phase, before the actual writing started. But somehow when the dreaded draft phase began, we fell into the more isolated pattern where one person writes, then passes it on to the next person for revision, who passes it on to me for editing. Discussing it in community would be less stressful and more productive, I believe.

For the training program, I’m putting out a call for support buddies on my favorite online forums. Maybe I can check in with them with progress reports (thereby helping with goal #1, steady progress) (yay accountability!) and for regular cheerleading. And especially for brainstorming and bouncing ideas around.

So that’s the plan. Asking for help. Not sure why this has always been so hard for me. Fear of rejection? Maybe just forgetting it’s an option, after having been self-employed for so long? I don’t need know the Why, so much, at this point, but I’m hereby declaring my intention to change the What.

Well! This emptying-the-inbox plan is taking longer than I expected.

One reason I posted my intention to clean out my inbox, rather than just write about it afterward, was to give me some accountability. Going public with my plan has been keeping it at the front of my mind—pushing me to actually do something I’ve been thinking about doing for months. But it isn’t done yet.

So here’s what I’m noticing.

The hugeness barrier

I’m loosely following Mark Hurst’s cleanup guidelines in Bit Literacy. He insists that a pristine inbox starts with one intense purging session (what he calls the Induction process). Devote a couple of hours to nothing but shoveling? I thought I was game for it, but gee, somehow that three- to four-hour window just never seemed to materialize. And my resistance to the task was only growing as time passed. So I decided to buck Hurst’s prescription and tackle the job in stages.

I’m happy to report that in one hour I pared things down from 251 messages to 156. Not bad. What helped:

• Sort. This is a Hurst technique I liked. I sorted by subject line first, which tended to put the newsletters and other related messages together…making it easier to delete the older stuff.

• Create new folders, as many as you want. My half-tongue-in-cheek plan to create a “Read-contemplate-decide” folder really did work. I created an “Inspiration” folder too. I even made a subfolder for one particular author. Don’t those folders sort of overlap? Who cares? Now I have a place to file all the messages and articles I’ve been meaning to re-read in hopes they would Change My Entire Way of Functioning In the World. Zoom, zoom, zoom, file, file, file. Will I read them now that they’re in the folders? Who knows? But I wasn’t reading those articles when they languished in my inbox, and now they’re not causing me stress.

• Use the one-minute rule. For this, I thank my commenters. I’ve never liked the much-recommended guideline that says: Handle immediately any email containing a task that will take two minutes or less to finish. Let’s face it, an inbox full of two-minute tasks will take a lot longer than a few hours to get through, making the whole cleanup project look even more unpleasant. Sharon Anderson suggested, instead, tackling emails that look like they’ll be one-minute tasks. I’ve been using a timer to see how much I really can get done in a minute, and even when the action takes longer, the one-minute goal keeps me alert and moving quickly. (I use a timer that counts up, not down, so that I don’t have to hear the preachy old “ding” and feel like I messed up. I just note how long the task actually took.)

Everything else gets entered in the calendar or added to the to-do list.

I’ve been waiting for another hour to materialize so I can get through the rest of the inbox, but the idea of spending another hour on this is feeling kind of oppressive. So I’m interested to see how many messages I can clear out in, let’s say, a half-hour, or even 15 minutes.

The moral I keep coming back to:

No matter how much you like the sound of somebody else’s method, don’t wait too long to spin it your own way.

Onward…

I’m in favor of keeping a close-to-empty inbox. In theory. I have managed to get mine nearly empty, from time to time.

There are good reasons do to it: All those undealt-with messages create background stress. And it’s a waste of time to keep re-opening the same messages only to continue leaving them there, unresolved.

But like so many vaunted time management strategies, the empty inbox is hard to maintain once you’re past the initial exhilaration of seeing it nice and clean.

Ah, emptiness

I’ve been reading Mark Hurst’s Bit Literacy. Hurst certainly isn’t the first to recommend clearing out your inbox regularly. (Merlin Mann, for one, is writing a book about it.) But I like that Hurst doesn’t make things too complicated. With each message your choices are to…

• delete or file it (if it’s an FYI);
• act on it (if the action takes under two minutes) and then delete it; or
• add the task to your to-do list (if it will take longer than two minutes), then delete it.

Something else I like: He recommends dealing with personal email first—savoring it. OK, that’s different! I’m all for rewarding yourself first and making personal life primary. That’s a value that draws a lot of us to the entrepreneurial life.

Now, in order to get to that happy “Steady-state” where the emails are flowing right along day after day, you must first go through the radical process of “Induction”—clearing out your inbox in one intense session lasting several hours. (BTW, note that Hurst has achieved the minimum requirement for a bestselling time management philosophy—cool terms for common functions.) During Induction, you have to be especially tough (brutal) about unread newsletters and such. Delete, delete, delete.

Then you sort so that the oldest messages are on top and deal with them one by one: either file, take quick action, or plunk them onto your to-do list. And delete.

And none of this almost-empty business for Hurst. It’s gotta be all the way to zero. Otherwise, he argues, you’re doing the hard work without getting the nice refreshing payoff of total emptiness. Plus the emails that accumulate tend to be complex, making it progressively harder to get back to that blissful empty state.

Getting ready for the purge

I’m gearing up to tackle my own inbox, which has 223 emails in it right now. I want this to work, so I’m thinking through potential obstacles. My reservations:

- Can Induction really be completed in a few hours? And am I OK with the level of brutality required?

- What do I do about the emails that require pondering? The ones that contain messages or that link to articles worth contemplating (maybe for future blog posts), or rereading, or printing out, or deciding about, or…? I think I know the answer to this—move them into their own folder, called something like “Read-contemplate-decide”—maybe a subfolder in my Blog ideas folder. Or print them out to take with me for when I’m waiting at the bus stop or the checkout line. I’ve been leaving them in the inbox to remind me to read-contemplate-decide-blog-about them. Since I’m not doing the reading, this system isn’t working. We’ll see if shoveling them into a folder works better.

- How do I manage that consarned two-minute guideline? Tasks that should take me two minutes nearly always take longer. Not sure if that’s from me being a perfectionist or being overly optimistic about estimating time or what. Maybe I’ll just track myself for a while—set the timer for each supposedly-two-minute action, see how long the task actually takes, and find out if my speed or estimating skills improve. I’m also skeptical about whether this two-minute campaign will get me through the whole inbox in a few hours. (Calculating: two minutes over two hours equals 60 emails—I’ve got a lot more than 60 to get through.)

As with my paper clutter,  a lot of the clutter in my inbox represents good intentions…not to mention decisions I still need to make and don’t want to. Maybe I need an email folder called Good Intentions! And another one called Decisions! I’m wondering whether a similar approach to the one I’m trying to take with paper (talk about the idea the message represents, blog about it, trust my good sense and life experience so I can let the message go) would work for my electronic clutter.

Anyway—I’m going to experiment and see how long Induction actually takes, what the stumbling blocks are, and whether it’s really worth it to keep my inbox empty. Hurst says to empty it at least once a day, the end of the day being a logical time to do this.

An important thing I want to pay attention to is: when any part of the process takes too long, where am I getting stuck?

Here goes. Tea and chocolate at the ready. I’ll report back.

I’m big on gentle accountability. So I’m a fan of Cairene Macdonald’s monthly Bite the Candy sessions. You spend the morning working on a backlogged project, with moral support (via phone check-ins) from Cairene and your fellow project-doers before and during your work session, and celebration after.

My project for last week’s Bite the Candy was to reorganize a file drawer of materials from some of the business writing workshops I’ve led. There’s good information in those files, but it’s been jumbled. I need to be able to get my hands on what’s in there, quickly—especially exercises and examples that I can adapt for future workshops.

Just thinking about reorganizing all that information made me tired. My typical pattern, when I go through files, is to get caught up in looking at every page, evaluating whether to toss or keep it, and if I keep it, whether it should be moved and where. (I’m a detail nut and a reading junkie—what can I say?) It takes hours just to go through a few folders. I love dumping the castoffs into the recycling bin, but I don’t get to enjoy a feeling of accomplishment because so much more remains to be done. Plus I know this is not a great use of my time. So I’d been avoiding these workshop files.

Yet I got the job done in one morning! Here’s what was different. I pre-planned how to manage the project so it wouldn’t drive me crazy…and so that if I stopped before I finished, I’d be able to pick it up again without wasting time figuring out where I’d left off.

I also asked myself—important—what would be the simplest way to approach it, involving the least amount of work.

The two-part solution: 

• I got out a plastic file crate, so that I could pull from the drawer just the files I wanted to work on, and put them in the crate.
• For the few hours I devoted to the project, I made it my task just to locate the various writing exercises and examples, wherever they were in their different folders. I didn’t have to revamp all my workshop files. I only needed to find out what was there.

The crate meant that I could easily come back to the project if I didn’t complete it that day. It also put a comforting physical frame around the task.

Limiting my goal to identifying the exercises and examples meant I didn’t have to study each piece of paper. It was enough to glance at a page, and if it was what I was looking for, to mark it quickly, with a sticky note or by turning it sideways.

I didn’t create (as I’d previously thought about doing) a new filing system that was topic- or function-based rather than client-based. I just left the pages in whatever client folders I’d found them in—but I clipped the examples together and put them in the very front of those folders. Now I can search by client and find the examples pretty quickly.

On a separate piece of paper—bright pink so it will be easy to find, and in its own folder in front of everything else—I scribbled the names of every client file that contains useable examples. It’s a decent workaround and a good-enough solution for what I need.

For the first time in recent memory, I finished a filing-related project in a couple of hours. Whew.

If you have a project to tackle and don’t want to wait until the next Bite the Candy session, set up a joint accountability day with a friend. Email each other at the beginning of the day about what you’ll be working on, then report on your progress (and cheer each other on) throughout the day.

Before you begin, ask yourself: What’s the least I can do that will give me a feeling of accomplishment?

In fact, why not ask yourself that question about any project you’ve been avoiding? Post your answer in the comments if you like, or send me an email: janet [at] janetbailey[dot]com. I’d love to hear how you’re simplifying your projects.

OK, enough writer’s angst. Today, back to the to-do list! Specifically, Mark Forster’s take on it, called Autofocus.

I’ve referred to Autofocus a few times not because it’s the be-all and end-all of time management tools (no such thing—you gotta do what works for you), but because it’s so different from what’s out there. It acknowledges resistance to tasks—something a lot of other systems gloss over—and works with that resistance in a practical, matter-of-fact, friendly way. I think it’s especially useful for creative, rebellious sorts who don’t like to be regimented but still want to see progress on important tasks both large and small.

The last time I blogged about Autofocus (AF for short), Mark had just come out with a revised version that addressed some problems with the previous version. Now he’s got an even newer version, AF4, that addresses problems with earlier revisions. I know how this sounds!, and lest all these revisions raise doubts about how well the system works, give Mark credit for testing and adapting it—incorporating user experience and not treating AF as set in stone.

Besides the instructions for AF4, there’s now a really helpful illustration of the process: a PDF based on Mark’s own real-time list. (You can get to it from the AF discussion thread by clicking the link in paragraph 2.) Created by a fan of AF, the PDF is worth downloading—it’s a large file—as it gives you a way to look over Mark’s shoulder and see the system in action. Don’t worry about the high page count of the PDF—just keep advancing the pages and you’ll get a quick, straightforward experience of watching Mark work his way down the list.

This is key: Autofocus wasn’t revealed to Mark from on high. Same with any other time management system or guru. Mark’s got his rules, and it makes sense to follow the rules as you’re learning the method. If you’re someone who keeps trying and giving up on complicated time management systems, remember that a system works great for the person who designed it, a person who is wired differently from you. So do what you need to do, to get it to work for you. Cobble together pieces of systems that you like, and don’t worry about the pieces that don’t work.

I myself started using previous versions of AF with gusto, only to abandon them when life got too busy and hectic. This is a danger that people report about pretty much any time management system, and it’s one reason I’m skeptical of true believers in any approach.

So I made my own adjustment this week. I got back from vacation a few days ago, to a typical post-vacation pile of tasks with semi-urgent deadlines. It didn’t make sense for me to work Autofocus the usual way, cycling once through current tasks, then zooming through my backlog a few times before returning to the current list. (Don’t attempt or evaluate AF based just on my summary! Read Forster’s instructions and skim the comments to get an idea of the benefits of AF as well as the details.) Instead, I did a brain dump of everything that needed to get done the first few days I was back, and cycled through that stand-alone list until sanity returned. Now I’m ready to go back to Mark’s rules. With renewed enthusiasm.