An Overflowing Inbox Is Not A Kanban System

From David Allen (no link available):

It is a residue from the industrial and agricultural world, I think, when the things to be done were much more physically self-evident. The "piles" in most offices nowadays seem just meager attempts to reproduce the self-evidence of the crops, the machinery, the things to be made and moved of bygone times. But self-evidence is not forthcoming without more discrete focus and more self-directed thinking.

From a lean perspective, I think what people are looking for is a kanban system and visual controls to manage their work in the office. When the inbox starts to overflow, time to sort through it. When the mailbox gets overloaded with email, and the anxiety level gets high enough, time to scan the messages.

But these are emotional rather than rational cues.

Better to have cues built on an optimal worklow.  This means emptying all the buckets on a daily basis, and using your organizational system to cue when to take action on items. Get the mailbox down to zero three times daily, even if this means putting some of those emails in an @Action folder, until you have time to fully process them. Then cue up the work based on deadlines (i.e. customer demand) and maintaining continuous flow.

Overflowing buckets also indicate excessive inventory and poor processes. Time to rework your system.

And your inbox usually operates as a push system, rather than a pull system.

The point here is to use real cues instead of the artifical and misleading physical cues that emerge in an office environment.  The height of paper stacked on your credenza doesn't (or shouldn't) tell you what to do and when to do it.

Reducing Stress With Checklists and GTD

In the ABA Journal, Martha Neil writes:

A sense of impending doom is a common feeling for many attorneys in practice: From the mistake made when drafting a document or taking a deposition to a transgression that you may not even be aware of yet, there's always something lurking in your consciousness to produce a feeling of being "in trouble."

She goes on to quote a psychotherapist and former lawyer who believes on-the-job stress can cause diagnosable disorders. I'll leave that question to the mental health professionals. But this will certainly sound familiar to any litigator.

While it's probably impossible to avoid stress in law practice entirely, checklists make a huge difference in addressing anxiety levels. If you've done a good job developing your checklist, you're much less likely to feel like you're forgetting something critical. And getting "In to zero" with GTD eliminates that feeling that something bad out there is waiting to bite you.

Ninja Email Laws

Time Management Ninja offers “9 Laws for Work Email.” They're all worth checking out. My favorite is "Keep it Short," with the suggestion that all emails be less than five lines long. But I particularly like this insight:

Do not expect an immediate response – In our hyper connected world, email is the new snail mail. Once upon a time, email was considered fast. Wanted a quick response? Send an email. But it has since been demoted down the communication response priority list. If you need a more immediate response: call, text, or come see me. Many people check email only 2-3 times a day and are turning off their work email on breaks and weekends.

It's just impossible for busy people to reply quickly anymore. Handhelds aren't the solution, and by contributing to the volume of sent email, arguably they're part of the problem. And constant checking and responding to emails is poor workflow. If you need an immediate response, better choose a different medium.

If you find these rules useful, be sure to visit Merlin Mann's series of posts on email best practices.

D. Mark Jackson