DEVELOPMENT
And with dozens or even hundreds of these sub-
conscious ‘open loops’, it uses up a lot of RAM
(random access memory), making it harder to
focus, think clearly and feel organised.
As Allen says, the reason your mind won’t let
these things go is because
w you haven’t clarified the intended outcome
w you haven’t identified the specific ‘next action’
w you haven’t captured the outcome or next
action in a system you trust
The timeless
solution for
managing
your inbox
Are you one of more than 60 percent of
EAs that feel they are overwhelmed by
their inbox or are only just surviving?
The feedback from this year’s Executive PA
Summits highlights the stress and frustration
that is involved in keeping up with all the email
and workload EAs handle daily. Much of this
stress comes from trying to keep track of all the
‘unfinished business’ and ‘open loops’ sitting in
the inbox, and re-reading them day after day.
As David Allen, leading American productivity
consultant and famous for his Getting Things Done
(GTD) methodology says, we will “invariably
experience greater relaxation, better focus and
increased productive energy when we learn to
effectively control these ‘open loops’ of our lives.”
Whenever you read an email, however briefly,
it opens up a mental file and is being tracked
by the less-than-conscious part of your mind.
56 Chief of Staff | Issue 3 2019
As a specialist in the email field, I would add to
these that you haven’t identified when you will
come back to the email.
Even if you’ve clarified the next action, your
mind won’t let go until you capture it in a place
it knows you will, without fail, check at the
appropriate time. Your mind will keep nagging
and pressuring you about that piece of unfinished
business (usually when you can’t do anything
about it), which just adds to your stress.
Gretchen Rubin has wonderfully articulated
this in her book The Happiness Project, “When
unfinished tasks are put off for a long time, they
end up haunting us, making us feel unsatisfied
and robbing us of our energy.”
Thinking in a concentrated way to define next
actions and desired outcomes is something few
EAs have time for, especially when monitoring
a busy inbox. That’s why we spend so much
time in my workshops, coaching and conference
presentations talking about the importance of
when you should look at the inbox.
Your mind simply will not do the thinking
that’s needed to process an email unless you set
aside a specific block of time to fully focus on
this task. Allowing email as an interruption or
checking it at random times or on an ‘ad hoc’
basis is so terribly ineffective. You read and
re-read the same email multiple times. But I
believe that your time is too valuable to ever read
the same email more than once.
As David Allen has written, the timeless
solution for managing your ‘stuff’, regardless of
whatever new technology is available is having
w a process for capturing the things that need
your attention
w the mental rigour to clarify and decide what
the things mean to you
w a trusted system for organising the resulting
to-do items
w the personal discipline to take action
And this is very relevant to the way you handle
email each day. The two step 4D Triage and Plan
process shows you how to handle each email only
once. It is based on the ‘lean’ approach used by
Michael Hoffman at LeanMail, that minimises