In the previous post, I described the inbox as a psychological boundary.
It is the line between your attention and everyone else’s demands.
That idea is useful, but it only becomes practical when it changes behaviour.
So here is one simple habit to try: process your inbox before you work from it.
Continue reading One boundary-setting inbox habitSomeone once said, “Your inbox is a to do list written by other people.”
Your email inbox is not just a place where messages arrive. It is a boundary between your attention and everyone else’s demands.
That boundary matters.
Without it, the working day becomes reactive. You open your email, Teams, Slack, WhatsApp or your task app and immediately begin responding to whatever has appeared most recently.
That can feel productive.
But often it is not decision-making. It is only responding.
Continue reading Your inbox is a psychological boundary
Over the last few years, I have been slowly embracing a more minimalist approach to life. For me, minimalism isn’t about ditching everything and living a stoic lifestyle with nothing on my countertops and empty rooms—it’s about living with purpose and only keeping those things that bring value to my life.
Something that I identified that does not bring much value is the tens of email newsletters that I found myself receiving daily. I found them distracting. I found them time-consuming, going through each and needing to decide what to do with it… win it or bin it? Mostly, I’d bin in. What a waste of electricity!
A few weeks ago, I took delivery of Cal Newport’s latest book A World Without Email: Reimagining Work in an Age of Overload. As I began to read it, I was immediately inspired to begin to reduce the amount of email I receive.
I opened a Trello ticket on my current projects board called “Unsubscribe from email newsletters” and created a list to capture everything that I unsubscribe from; that way, if I realise later that I did get value from it, I knew where to go to resubscribe.
I had one simple rule: does this email newsletter give me value? If the answer was either no or I’m not sure, I unsubscribed from it and recorded that in my list.
I have been running this experiment for a little over one month now and I have unsubscribed from 67 email newsletters.
My inbox is now much clearer.
It takes me only a few minutes each day (rather than maybe one hour) to deal with emails.
I can immediately see messages of value—emails from friends and strangers, emails requiring action, and the newsletters that I do want to read and from which I get a lot of value, for example the curious journal and weekly offerings from Documentally).
If you are feeling overwhelmed by the volume of email, I thoroughly recommend it.
For the last few years, I’ve been faithfully using eM Client as my preferred way of accessing my Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts. But this past weekend—having vowed to myself that during 2018 I wouldn’t change any of my productivity tools and instead just focus on getting stuff done—I made the switch to Kiwi for Gmail 2.0 and I have to say that I’m delighted.
Since Google upgraded their calendar to Material Design I’ve been hugely impressed and have found myself using it almost as much as eM Client’s API view of the calendar. I now prefer the default web app view more than the desktop client.
Similarly, I’ve also found myself using the Gmail webapp almost as much as eM Client, find it to be a little quicker but also feeling that I should get to know the web interface more because it’s the default view.
But what really tipped me over the edge towards moving away from eM Client is how long it takes to open Google Contacts.
I had used Kiwi for Gmail before, but version 2.0 seems to have been a cosmic leap forward compared with what I remembered of the first iteration.
Kiwi for Gmail appears to be a wrapper application that quickly—very quickly—loads the default Google web apps, with a little magic thrown in for good measure.
One of the most immediate is that I now have immediate access to five different Gmail accounts, without the need to log out of one before checking the other.
(This feature is only available in the paid-for version, which is currently on special offer for free with the code: WikiForFree.)
I’m really looking forward to Gmail getting the Material Design treatment. This will take Kiwi for Gmail to another level.
In the meantime, I’m going to see how I get on with Kiwi for Gmail. But for what it does, I can’t see myself going back to eM Client any time soon. I’ll try to remember to report back after a few months to give an update on how this experience is going.
I received this image as part of an email from Charles Tyrwhitt today.
That’s my kind of customer: someone who decides they like a particular item of clothing and stockpiles a load of them.
