I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.
Call it "lifehacking," or just call it, "paying attention to how you stay organized" – I don't care what you call it, I am an ardent practitioner of it.
I like improving my processes because I like what I do, and the more efficient I am at all of it (with apologies to Jenny Odell), the more of that stuff I can get done:
I want to do a lot of stuff. I am one of those people who is ten miles wide and one inch deep (it probably has something to do with imbibing Heinlein's maxim that "specialization is for insects" at an impressionable age). There's a million waterways I want to dip my toe (or my oar) into, and the better organized I am, the more of that stuff I'll get to do before I kick off. I'm 54, and while there's a lot of road ahead of me, I can see the end, off there in the distance. It's coming, and I'm not done – I'm barely getting started.
I've been around lifehacking since the very moment it was born. I was there. I published the notes on Danny O'Brien's seminal 2004 talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, "Life Hacks: Tech Secrets of Overprolific Alpha Geeks":
https://craphound.com/lifehacksetcon04.txt
In the years since, I've cultivated a small – but mighty – repertoire of organizational habits and tools that let me get a hell of a lot done. Weirdly, many of these tools are things that other people hate, and I can see why – they use them in very different ways from me. That's true of browser tabs (I loooove browser tabs):
And to-do lists, which will totally transform your life, once you realize that the most important to-do list is the one you maintain for everyone else who owes you a response, a package, or money:
Other essential tools languish in neglect, artifacts of the old, good web – the elegant weapons that dominated a more civilized age. First among these? RSS readers:
I will freely stipulate that people have a good reason to hate all this stuff. "Productivity porn" is often proffered as a mix of humblebrag (a way to make other people jealous of your almighty "productivity") and denial (fiddling with your systems is a ready substitute for actually doing things). Many (most?) of the foremost self-appointed pitchmen for "lifehacking" are cringey charlatans peddling "courses" and other nonsense.
But if you keep digging, there's a solid foundation beneath all the rot. At its very best, this stuff is a way to figure out what you really want to do, and to organize your life so that the stuff you want to do is the stuff you're doing.
A lot of people get into this kind of thing thinking it'll let them do everything. No one can do everything. The best you can hope for is to make conscious decisions about which stuff you'll never get to, while leaving at least a little room for serendipity.
Like I said, I want to do a lot of stuff. My organizing tactics are as much about deciding what I won't do as they are about deciding what I will do:
Which brings me to another tool that everyone hates and I love: email. I live and die by email.
First of all, I filter all my incoming email: mail from people who are in my address book stays in my inbox; mail from people I've never heard from before goes into a mailbox called "People I don't know." When I reply to a message, Thunderbird adds the recipient to my address book, so the next time I hear from them, they'll stay in my main mailbox.
I also filter out anything containing the word "unsubscribe," sending it into a folder called "Unlikely" (but not if the message contains my name – which is how I can stay subscribed to mailing lists I don't have time to read and make sure to reply when someone mentions me).
Second of all, I have a zillion Quicktext macros that I use to reply to frequently asked questions. I have one that spits out my mailing address; another that spits out my bio; and others for politely saying no to things I don't have time for, for information about how to pay one of my invoices, etc, etc.
Third: I have a small folder of emails that I can't reply to right away (usually because I need some information from a third party), which I review every morning and answer anything that I can clear.
Finally, I save it all. I have so much saved email, which means that if you ask me about something from 20 years ago, there's a good chance I can find it – provided we organized it over email.
All of which explains why I refuse – to the extent that I can – to do anything important over instant messaging, whether that's Signal or any of the other messaging tools that come with social media, workplace software, etc.
I understand why people like instant messaging: it does not overwhelm you with the burdens of the past. It is largely ahistorical, with archives that are hard to access and search. Its norms and register are less formal than email.
And, of course, instant messaging is far superior to email in some contexts. If you're on vacation with friends, having a big group-chat where you can say, "I'm making dinner – is everyone OK with cheese?" is indispensable. Same goes for asking a friend for directions, announcing that you've arrived at someone's office, or confirming whether it's OK to substitute 2% for whole milk on a grocery run.
But if you're like me – if you've figured out how to do as many of the things that matter to you as you can possibly squeeze in, then getting an IM mid-flow is like someone walking up to a juggler who's working on a live chainsaw, a bowling ball, and a machete and tossing him a watermelon while shouting, "Hey, catch this!"
The problem is that if you are asking about something important, something that can't be instantaneously managed by the recipient, then they will have to drop everything they're doing and, at the very least, make a note to themselves to go back to your message later and deal with it. Instant messaging doesn't have an inbox with everything you've been sent. Of course, that's why people love it. But the fact that you can't see all the things other people are expecting you to answer doesn't mean that they aren't expecting it. It also doesn't mean that everything will be fine if you just ignore all those messages.
Instant messaging is a great tool for managing something that everyone is doing at the same time. It's also a nice way to keep an ambient social flow of updates from people in a rocking groupchat. But IM is fundamentally unserious. It is antithetical to the project of making a conscious decision about what you won't do, so that you do as many of the things that matter to you before you get to the end of the road.
A massive email inbox is intimidating, but switching to IMs doesn't make all the demands in the email go away. It just puts them out of sight until they either expire or explode. Far better to decide what balls you're going to drop than to have them knocked out of your hand by a fast-moving watermelon.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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I previously mentioned "Inbox Zero" as like the one piece of corporate-principle-type stuff from my new job that I'm actually 100% on board for, and I wanted to share an update.
So apparently it's relatively controversial in the business world whether "Inbox Zero" should mean that you have zero unread emails in your inbox, or you should have zero emails in your main inbox (i.e. everything in your main inbox is sorted into folders, and then you keep sorting them as you get them).
I started with the "zero unread emails" approach, where you make some folders, but anything that doesn't really fit one of your categories just stays in your main inbox as if that, in itself, is the miscellaneous folder. You open all your emails, but you don't sort all of them. That was cool, but I still found stuff getting lost on my last scan through my inbox because there were things that I opened, initially responded to, then forgot to follow up on.
So I switched to the approach of having zero emails in my inbox (and sorted like 30,000 emails across 5 email accounts over the past two weeks). Game changer. Now the only things I leave in my main inbox are things where the conversation, project, etc. has not been completed. Upon completion, they get sorted. Now my inbox is a to-do list, and I don't miss events, conversations, store promotions, - anything.
You can guess why this is very good and efficient for activism purposes, considering almost all the groups I work with communicate via email.
The screenshot above is from one of my misc email accounts (my personal has double-digits of folders), but all my accounts look like that now. Nothing in inbox, promotions, or social. I sort and delete things as I go. For my personal inbox, I let the promotions tab pile up for a month in case I get a store coupon that becomes relevant later, but then I delete everything in that tab at the beginning of each month.
This has been the hottest organizational tip that I've received in years, and it is vibing so hard with my ADHD.
^^^Credit to fellow Tumblrite, @catcrumb for this image which pops into my mind every single time I sort something.
As much of a joke as it is, Ive seen yall cupcakes asking. This is essentially what he suggests:
How to "do" Inbox Zero:
As soon as you get an email, sort it. It goes into one of these:
Delegate, Defer, Respond, Do, Delete
At the top of every hour, you "do" them. Delegate is giving to someone else, defer is waiting, do is doing whatever it needs, respond is responding, or delete it. Do this for a certain amount of time, or until done (cant remember which)
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For the first time since my exam in mid-December I've actually been properly productive today
- I found some research papers about my final year project topic
- I finished off writing a game review
- I edited two other reviews so they are ready to be uploaded
- I responded to emails
- I updated my LinkedIn Profile
- I cleared my email inbox of 4000 emails!!! How did I get so many??
So yeah, not a bad way to get back into things, now I just have to keep it up and get my project proposal written by the end of the week so I can edit and improve it next week ready for submission at the end of the month
