I recently started a job and today, for the first time, I had the chance to apply, in a professional context, a principle that I’ve been consistently following in my life in general. The inspiration actually came from email productivity tips. It was the idea that your inbox, as the name suggests, is the point of entry for messages into your email; it’s where they arrive but shouldn’t remain. So when you open your inbox, you should ideally sort through the messages, read them, determine whether to respond, ignore, create an appointment etc., and then remove them from the inbox. You don’t look at the same email twice, and if you need to save it it’s in a repository which is separate from the inbox.

Later I encountered this idea in a more general form in the classic book Getting Things Done, by David Allen. To give my personal gloss on the idea, various things apart from email can be seen as inputs, and the most efficient response is to ‘process’ or ‘digest’ them, so to speak. You examine them, extract what you need, clarify any actions you need to take, and then do not deal with the things themselves again. On the front end, it requires a bit more effort, but this is more than made up for because this obviates the need to deal with unprocessed things repeatedly.

Today at the office, then, I resumed work on a file that I had been working on last week. The files I deal with are typically made up of thick folders containing reams of correspondence, documents, and forms. Thankfully, the first time I had gone through it I wrote a memo to myself summarizing the key points and the next steps that needed to be taken to move the process along. At the time, I wasn’t necessarily envisioning the situation where I would be called upon to return to the matter, but as it turned out this initial investment spared me a significant amount of work the second time round. It was a vindication of my approach.

In all areas of my life, I’ve been trying to adopt this active, critical attitude, and though it can feel somewhat cold, utilitarian, or mechanistic, the effect on my overall efficacy has been really motivating.