2020 in Productivity
How I tamed my inbox and to-do list
I considered myself quite organized until I joined Google in 2018. The volume of emails and the action-items embedded within infinitely long threads with 30 people on CC was on a scale I hadn’t quite encountered before.
After I returned from my maternity leave in the fall of 2019 with only 2,998,999 unread emails, I knew I had to tame the beast. By using a combination of multiple inboxes and a bullet journal, I have been able to find a system to stay organized.
Multiple inboxes
This is also known as zero-inboxing. I use the multiple inbox feature in gmail to help me to do this. It’s a quick filtering of incoming email into buckets of what needs to be done now vs later. It requires you to label your email but the act of doing so forces you to prioritize.
I have four buckets for my email:
- Inbox: This is raw unfiltered email on the left. Everything lands in here. If not relevant or important, I hit archive or delete aggressively. If anything requires more than 10 minutes to answer I will bucket into one of the following buckets on the right:
- Next Steps: There is an action item I need to get to later today or soon.
- Read Through: No action item but I should read it when I have time.
- Waiting For: I am waiting to hear back from someone else on this. If they don’t get back to me, I have to follow up to make sure it gets done.
I, however, do not use the inbox as a to-do list. Instead, I use a bullet journal for that purpose.
Bullet Journal
There are many ways to bullet journal. However, it only works for people who get a dopamine hit from scratching things off a list. I am that person through and through. My mother, although organized in her own way, is not a list maker. She, for example, would not find a bullet journal enjoyable or productive.
I use an adapted version of the canonical bullet journaling method by Carol Ryder but my main workhorse is what’s called a weekly Alastair spread. I highly recommend watching this video to understand how it works and giving it a try. The layout takes 3–5 minutes to set up and does not require understanding any of the overall bullet journaling method. Action items from inbox and meetings make it to my weekly Alastair tracker (page on the left). Events, errands, notes live on the right. I tick off what I complete this week. What I don’t is carried over to next week.
What I did not make progress on
I cracked the organizing and tracking of tasks — as part of which I also tracked how much deep, uninterrupted work I am getting done. Sadly not a lot. At my peak it was 30 hours/month, at my trough 5 hours/month. Clearly, organizing and deep work are separate things and I have work to do on the latter.
That’s what 2021 is for.
Note: This a a great article from the New Yorker that tears apart the culture of productivity. This is an entire book about how doing nothing is an act of rebellion against the relentless capitalist demand on our time and attention. I fully recognize the problem of being a productivity hamster and by writing this article I have contributed to it. Until the economic system changes, I still need a few tools to make it through the day and share them in that spirit.
