One-Touch to Inbox Zero

Tiago Forte on why touch each email only once is advice nobody can follow without a system underneath it — “this level of simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.”

The best idea is the physics. Email doesn’t grow linearly. Going from 100 to 200 to 400 messages doesn’t double then double the time — it behaves like chaos theory, crossing an invisible threshold where it undergoes a phase transition and consumes the day. Which is why volume-based coping strategies fail suddenly rather than gradually.

The technique: make a decisive decision about what each email needs — without actually doing it — and immediately send it somewhere else. The decision and the work are different jobs and must not happen in the same pass.

Two quotes Kyle kept: Blake’s “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s,” and Tolstoy’s “there is only one important time and it is Now.”

Notes

• The key to Inbox Zero, everyone knows, is to “touch each email only once.”
• But what most do not appreciate is that this level of simplicity is the ultimate sophistication — only a well-designed underlying system can make such elegant action possible.
• “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s” — William Blake Quotes
• Email To Do
  • Unsubscribe from everything and start from scratch
    • Think about Nat Eliason’s tip about canceling your credit cards and seeing what things get shut off that you actually use
• And yet for a tool central to our working lives, that represents a far worse compromise of incompatible functions, we somehow put up with a Frankenstein-like monstrosity of a communication tool/to do list/project manager/notification system/composition tool/reading list/file storage area/reference library/conversation archive/planning tool/note-taking app.
• We hired email for one simple job, and now it’s the codependent handyman living in our basement, banging away at odd jobs late into the night.
• Activities like email don’t obey the laws of classical Newtonian physics — they don’t grow linearly. Meaning, as you go from receiving 100 to 200 to 300 to 400 emails, the time and energy you must spend to manage these emails does not increase proportionally from 1x, to 2x, to 3x, to 4x.
• Instead, email operates more like chaos theory: at some point the time/energy required crosses a critical threshold, an unpredictable, invisible boundary. It undergoes a phase transition, like ice changing to water and then to steam. The parameters change and the effects explode, cascading across the rest of your workflow with mounting consequences.
• The key is to set up a workflow that allows for One-Touch — making a decisive decision about what needs to be done about each email, WITHOUT ACTUALLY DOING IT, and then immediately sending each email to an appropriate place where it will be dealt with at the right time.
• Remember that there is only one important time and it is Now. The present moment is the only time over which we have dominion. — Leo Tolstoy Quotes